War Stories
by Constant Babble
Summary: Angel and the Ninth Doctor meet for the third time. Both suffering from significant personal losses, they'd really just like to sit down, have a drink, and mutually ignore their issues. Unfortunately, the Time War is coming back to haunt the Doctor in a very real way and Angel needs to decide if he's the sort of man who buys milk for guests.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** Hello! We're about to say something a bit scary, but hear us out: this is the seventh story in the _Blood and Time_ series and it's a slight crossover with Constant Comment Tea's _Interaction_ series. Hold on, it's fine.

We've written this story so that if it's your first foray into the series (either of them, although this is more _Blood and Time_ than it is _Interaction_ ), you won't be completely lost. Hopefully we've adequately balanced helpful exposition with decent pacing.

However, for a little extra context:  
1\. This is the Doctor's third encounter with Angel and Angel's seventh with the Doctor. Angel has met 9, 10, and 11.  
2\. There are several events/bits of knowledge that are referenced throughout this story. Pretty much all of them are from _A Short Trip Outside the Universe_ , so if you want to know more, go read that. (And the bit about Martha's letter is from _The Moon Thesis_.)  
3\. Angel has been Mr. Reclusive-Vampire for the past 200 years for reasons that you find out in the _Interaction_ series but don't need to know here (in detail). Essentially, he's tired of losing people he loves, so he stopped loving altogether. Or tried to.

For those of you who have read the Interaction series, this story takes place during the period of time in the first story when Judith Cole is trying to decide if she's going to let her young son befriend an ensouled vampire (Chapter Five, _The Art of Human Interaction_ ).

* * *

Grocery stores sure had changed since Angel's time.

Of course, they hadn't really _had_ grocery stores in Angel's time, so maybe that was Angel's tendency to dramatize his age coming through. (Though he felt justified in it now more than ever—even Darla hadn't made it to 453.)

But still, Angel pondered as he stared at the entrance to Sullivan's, brightly lit and plastered with advertisements announcing a BOGO sale on toothpaste and 30% off ribeye steaks. Used to be, you had to go to several shops and stands to get all of your edible needs, and if Isaac Murphy was out of pig fat, then you were out of luck. Now, it was all available in one convenient superstore, with too many options and so much back stock they had to have sales like "BOGO"s (what the hell was a BOGO, anyway?) to get rid of it all.

The sheer brightness of the lights inside intimidated Angel. He could almost hear the buzzing from here (never mind that society had made the full switch from fluorescents to LEDs more than a century ago—Angel still swore he could hear buzzing). Angel took a step backward: he could get the milk some other time.

Or not at all. Not at all was good, too. Why had he even agreed to _get_ fresh milk? Some fleeting desire not to burn bridges, when that's all he'd been doing the past 200 years?

"You're a damn idiot, Angel," he muttered out loud. The next time a few humans decided he was interesting enough to hang around and pester, the correct response would be, "Yes, actually, I'm super-dangerous and definitely want to eat your child, so _go away_."

Angel swallowed, backing up another step. Someone passed between him and the store, looking at something intently on their Palm—texting or something-interrupting his view and his moment like scissors cutting a taut cord.

That was a fair point: Angel had sworn with good reason not to meddle in the affairs of humans anymore. Good, painful, infuriating, war-sparking reason.

(It wasn't exactly a war. Angel was being overly dramatic again. But it _felt_ like a war.)

A cool early-September breeze flapped Angel's leather coat around his thighs and he turned away from it, starting a brisk walk away. He had other errands to run that night.

The doors of the grocery store shwooped open and closed behind him. The sound of the automatic slide of metal and plastic automatically engaged to let someone more human exit and then the quick tap of shoes approached him on the sidewalk.

Instead of passing him, though, the person drew up next to Angel on his right and fell in step with him.

"So, do you think milking a cow is worse than grocery stores?" the man next to Angel asked, holding up a box of milk out for contemplation. "On one hand, I can't stand grocery stores. On the other hand, what would I do with a cow the rest of the time? They're not great at conversation. Believe me, I've tried."

Angel blinked. A hint of recognition registered in the back of his mind even as he turned to look at the person and stepped to the side to distance himself from the conversation that he unwillingly found himself a part of (why did people keep doing that to him?). He took in the leather jacket, the short hair, the hawkish nose.

"Doctor?"

"Still," the Doctor shrugged, pulling the milk back and slipping it into his pocket, "grocery shops." He shot a scathing look over his shoulder. "It's all so...domestic."

"Actually, yeah," Angel agreed. That was it. Not how he would have said it, but that was a very large part of the problem with grocery stores. Too domestic. And "domestic" was a little too close to "human." Angel didn't have a problem being in touch with some of his more human aspects, but he was a vampire, too. There hadn't been anyone else around to remind him not to be so vampiric for at least 150 years, and he'd found it liberating.

Of course, now he had another (doubly related) problem: the last time Angel had seen this man - about 200 years ago - he'd worn tweed and a bow tie and had been bleeding to death due to an Angel-inflicted neck wound.

Maybe Angel had been a little too in touch with his vampire side that time, but Angel had had a mostly-defendable, very compelling reason to do it: survival. The instinct had kicked in, crashing sideways into his morality and bouncing off again with the rationale that he would stop before drinking too much. He hadn't counted on that being more difficult to do with Time Lords than with humans.

The most vampiric part of that incident wasn't so much sucking the blood out of the Doctor's veins as it was how Angel very well might have killed the Doctor to save himself. The first act was a natural instinct of the beast; the second was a more conscious kind of beastly.

"But then, so are cows." The Doctor tipped his head. "Maybe."

"Definitely," Angel replied, bringing himself back to the conversation. Cows and domesticity, not blood and the possible, accidental past-for-him, future-for-the-victim murder of the man beside him.

Angel tried to think about cows. He tried to think about being domestic.

"What are you doing here?" Angel asked when that completely failed.

"Getting milk. What's it look like I'm doing?"

Angel veered right toward a staircase leading up to the pedestrian walkways above them. The Doctor veered with him as if he'd been intending to go that way, too. "Getting milk here?" Angel asked.

"Yeah, here." The Doctor tossed his arms out, but quickly pulled them back in as he entered the narrow, yet well-lit stairwell. "I picked a random spot, on a random day, in the middle of nowhere. And here I am. Welcome to the middle of nowhere, eternally lost vampire."

Angel glared back at the Doctor. "You call _this_ ," he thrust out one arm to gesture to the city skyscrapers visible through the glass walls around them as they ascended the stairs, "the middle of _nowhere_?"

"On a universal scale, this whole planet is the middle of nowhere. Not that that's a bad thing. I happen to like it here. Even if the population is a little..." he huffed out a breath and looked away out through the glass.

Angel huffed out a very similar breath and looked the other way out the glass. He tried not to notice how similar their coats were, too.

"Alright, fine," Angel finally agreed, pausing as they reached the top of the stairs. There was a bridge to cross the street in front of them, but they could also turn right or left into the buildings on either side of them. "You're getting milk. I guess after 200 years, random run-ins getting milk are practically to be expected."

The Doctor gave a curt nod, and then his mouth dropped into a frown. "Maybe that is a little upsetting," he said. A maniac grin flashed across his face. "So," he said, tipping his chin up with the word, "how are you enjoying the year 2206?"

Angel shrugged. "Not much different from 2205."

"Right." The Doctor let out another huff of air. "Good to see you." He jerked a nod at Angel and marched off forward toward the bridge.

Angel watched him go several steps. Their last encounter had been 200 years in Angel's past and an unknown amount of time (but at least two deaths and subsequent regenerations) in the Doctor's future, but Angel could taste it like it happened yesterday. He could practically see the flowy golden wisps he'd hallucinated while high on the Doctor's life-potent blood. He shuffled his feet and they nearly turned him autonomously to the right to continue through the office building and a shopping center, then across the next bridge and down more stairs that would take him to street level and on with his night.

It was not at all that he was unconsciously scoping out a fix - though Angel would later wonder, in the midst of a particularly guilty brooding session, if that hadn't subconsciously been part of it. Instead of turning to the right, Angel's feet took him jogging after the Doctor. A long time ago, the Doctor had said something about being friends. Angel didn't need or want human friends, but the Doctor wasn't exactly human.

Actually, Angel didn't need or want _friends_ , but the Doctor wasn't exactly that, either. Not this version of him, anyway.

"So," Angel asked when he caught up, "who are you traveling with these days?" Angel suddenly remembered the lockbox he'd gotten to keep Martha Jones's letter in. He supposed it was about time to start carrying the letter around again, especially if tonight was a herald of encounters to come. What was it the Doctor had said last time? Give it a century or two? It was around two. Angel hoped he could find the key.

The Doctor turned his head to raise an eyebrow at Angel, an expression that marched lines all the way up his forehead. "Who said anything about traveling with someone? I don't travel with someones." He looked forward again and hunched his shoulders. "You know, I could. But I keep leaving out these little details. Did you know that my TARDIS travels in time?"

"Uh, yeah, I think we covered that the first time," Angel said.

"Exactly!" the Doctor exclaimed. "It's obvious. I should start with that. I mean, who wants to climb on any old spaceship? It could take ages to get anywhere. Would you want to climb onto a spaceship that takes five years just to get to the next galaxy?" Angel opened his mouth, but the Doctor cut him off. "Of course you wouldn't. It's barbaric."

Maybe Angel had chosen the wrong topic.

Maybe this was why he didn't have friends.

"So where are you heading next?" Angel tried.

"Maybe the stone age," the Doctor grumbled, "go spend time with the rest of the barbarians."

Strike two on the Conversation Attempts. Angel remembered the other versions of the Doctor being much chattier.

Maybe they were making up for this version.

The Doctor shook his head. "How about you?" he asked.

"Where am I going next?" Angel had to remember which of his errands he'd decided to do next. "I owe a Barbol demon some kittens, so...pet store." Toward that end, after they pushed open the door at the end of the bridge, he turned right, and the Doctor followed him through the door into an appliance store. Angel caught sight of the tall, thin cabinets that were steadfastly called refrigerators, a display of clothing boxes (Wash! Dry! Fold! Deliver!), and a collection of lime green egg-shaped machines as tall as him, which he honestly didn't know what they did. Bright flashing posters campaigned ostentatiously for the business of passersby like them.

The Doctor shot another look over at Angel, a wrinkle appearing at the bridge of his nose. "You're shopping for kittens?"

"Tabbies, if they have them," Angel nodded. He directed them straight through the field of appliances toward the far side of the building, "But long-haired works, too."

"You are the least threatening monster I have ever met, do you know that?"

"Hey," Angel raised a finger at the Doctor, " _all_ the cool demons play kitten poker."

The Doctor shrugged a shoulder. "You really had me going there. You start in with 'All vampires are evil' and then everything after that is saving people, meditation, and kittens."

Angel opened his mouth to reply something along the lines of (again), _Hey!_ plus some, but then he realized that there wasn't much to argue against. Not with this Doctor's experience, anyway. Was Angel morally obligated to tell him there's a good chance that Angel (accidentally) murdered him? Or was he chronologically obligated not to?

"If it helps," Angel finally said, ducking around a bin of clearance items at the store's far exit, "I don't save people anymore."

"Huh," the Doctor said. They turned left in the foyer outside the store, where they had the option of taking the stairs down to street level or continuing on toward another pedestrian bridge on the other side of the block. Normally, Angel liked the open air of being outside, but they had the kind of forward momentum that happens with two people walking together who don't know each other all that well that Angel didn't feel like breaking to take them downstairs, so they continued toward the bridge.

They walked on in silence long enough for Angel to wonder if he'd somehow struck out a third time and should consider himself expelled from the conversation game. They passed a bookstore (not a paper bookstore: more like a coffee shop with a kiosk where you could browse downloadable titles) and an entertainment store where the window display bombarded them with all new advertisements for the latest models of Palms, virtual reality games, and interactive movies.

Just as Angel decided that he had, in fact, lost the game, the Doctor said, "Then what do you do?" He reached out as they passed a mid-hall kiosk and idly spun some sort of frisbee-shaped device that whirled and blinked on its stand.

That question struck a little too close to home. Maybe he and the Doctor were friends in the future (past?), but explaining the complexities of his currently situation to this colder Doctor seemed...exhausting. Angel fumbled for something like the truth that wouldn't sound glib and kill the conversation again.

Much of his time was spent earning cash selling spells and knowledge. He still struggled to fit that cash into something that might be an investment portfolio. He'd had one developed for him during his time with Wolfram & Hart, but never really understood how it worked or how to replace the money when it eventually drained away over the years.

But he really didn't think that was a good topic to pursue. The Doctor had this nasty habit of being overly knowledgeable about everything and Angel didn't want to feel stupid.

Also much of his time was spent avoiding human interaction. He was succeeding with his excellent decision not to buy milk just now. Never mind that he had failed with his promise to have milk available in the first place.

Angel gave a nonchalant shrug.

"People come to me for info on spells and things." And stories. Stupid kids were all about the stories. "I play kitten poker. Keep my area of town quiet. The simple life, you know?"

"No," the Doctor said. "I don't." He stared at the sidewalk in front of him for several paces before asking. "Do you like it?"

Angel actually had to think about his answer. The question had never occurred to him. "I...wouldn't change it," he finally said.

"No?" the Doctor turned his head back to Angel, his stare almost a physical pressure. Angel had forgotten that about him, and honestly hadn't missed it. "People used to jump at the idea," the Doctor said, quietly, and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, tugging the jacket closer.

"I'm not people," Angel replied.

"Yeah, but neither am I." The Doctor flashed another grin at Angel. Maybe it was because Angel was more in tune with animal communication than most, but it looked more like a baring of teeth to him. "But maybe that's the point," the Doctor mused more to himself. He directed his next question at Angel. "So do you have friends here?"

Angel snorted, but said, "A few. If soulless vampires and demons from Hell can ever really be your friends."

"Exactly!" the Doctor nearly shouted. "Humans aren't the only game in town."

"Hell no!" Angel agreed emphatically. "Especially not _little_ humans."

"Sure, they're useful some of the time. But the rest? Nothing but trouble."

"You're telling _me_ ," Angel grumbled, crossing his arms. "Now I'm having to think about having milk in the fridge." Ridiculous.

"I'd have to adjust the temperature on the TARDIS."

"And I should probably make sure my weapons are out of reach..."

"They get at them anyway," the Doctor said professionally.

Stupid kids.

Angel glanced sideways at the Doctor and they paused by the automatic doors which opened to the next over-street crosswalk. "So...who are you talking about?"

"Rose Tyler," the Doctor grumbled at his feet. "You?"

"William Cole. And company." Angel rolled his eyes. The kid and his "very best friend in the entire world," Calder Lauchley, had been coming to see Angel for months, wanting stories about monsters. That's what Angel got for actually saving the boy from one… And now the _mother_ was involved, too. "I miss the days when kids were seen but not heard. Though it'd be great if they weren't seen, too…"

The Doctor laughed; a single, blunt, "Ha!" before he started walking again and led the way onto the crosswalk. "I miss..." he leaned his head back, looking up through the glass ceiling at the towering black buildings above them, lit here and there with the light of an office still in use after hours.

Eventually, the Doctor shook his head and dropped the sentence along with his gaze. "So you picked up some children while kitten shopping?"

Angel had to let out a laugh of irony. "This is kind of embarrassing, but...while saving one of them."

"How else are you supposed to meet people? I saved mine from shop dummies and then blew up her job."

"Well if _that_ doesn't get her to follow you…"

"She has to take care of her _boyfriend_." The Doctor rolled his eyes.

Angel winced. "Ouch. Boyfriends are tough. Did you tell her about how your ship is bigger?"

"Listen," the Doctor said, pausing halfway across the bridge and leaning closer to Angel, who also stopped. The Doctor pointed a finger at Angel's chest. "If I have to lower myself to the point of competing with that pathetic excuse of a human, it's not worth it. The problem isn't the boyfriend, the problem is I left out the time travel bit."

"Well," Angel adjusted his leather jacket on his shoulders. "That's not a line _I've_ ever used. But I guess if you have a type..."

"I don't think you're in a position to start a conversation about types," the Doctor said.

"What?" Angel muttered self-consciously. "I have types…"

"If it's children, I'm reporting you to someone."

"It's _not_ children," Angel said sharply. "That's the whole point. I mean, shouldn't they be _scared_ of me or something?"

"Well, it's not like you're scary," the Doctor pointed out.

Angel glared menacingly at the Doctor. "Kitten poker with a Barbol demon is _dangerous_ ," he growled. "Their cilia is poisonous, you know, and the tentacles _reach_."

The Doctor smiled back defiantly, grinning all the wider at Angel's glare. Eventually he looked away. "But I should go back, shouldn't I? Mention the time travel?"

Angel gave a half-shrug. "Personally, I'm trying to get rid of _my_ humans. Maybe I should buy _spoiled_ milk…"

"Right," the Doctor said. "You're right. It's not like..." but he never finished the sentence. He sucked in a breath and pulled himself out of whatever reverie he had drifted into. "Sometimes, it's better to just minimize the fallout."

"And fade back into the shadows," Angel agreed. Why had he been deliberating earlier? This was clearly the answer.

The Doctor grunted in agreement.

"So…" Angel said after a long moment of silence, in which Angel's mind abruptly switched from pet stores to pubs. "Whiskey?"

The Doctor's shoulders slumped towards Angel and he heaved out a long sigh of relief. "That would be fantastic."

Maybe he could do this conversation thing, Angel thought as they started forward again. So long as the other person was agreeable to his universal solution: namely, a wonderfully old bar in the section of town known as Old Galway where the buildings were shorter and still contained some old remnants of wood from a time when everything wasn't synthetic.

He might have even smiled, because the Doctor grinned back for a moment, before his eyes tracked past Angel through the glass that looked out across the city.

Angel turned, following his gaze east, looking out at tallest of the skyscrapers that made up the section of the city typically referred to as New Galway. Never mind that it hadn't been new for 150 years. The black structural glass of the grouping of the tallest buildings reflected the soft white light from the walkways in wavering lines like deep black pools. Below, cars drifted like fish in a lazy flow along the streets; not actually hovering as everyone expected of the future (except for the rare model that the wealthy and bored enjoyed purchasing). Rubber and wheels were much cheaper than hover technology, and probably always would be. That didn't mean that humanity hadn't figured out ways to make the rides _feel_ like hover tech, though.

They were standing over one of the main arteries through New Galway that led to the Doire, that black circle of the tallest buildings in the skyline that made up the main business sector of Galway.

As Angel's eyes grazed back from the skyscrapers to his left to the glass corridor ahead, they caught a motion on the building next to them. Angel had about five seconds to take in the giant arachnid form before it leapt at them.

In that five seconds, Angel's first impression was _scorpion_ ; although the thing was green, it had several legs thick as young trees surrounding an oval middle, pincers like a giant crab, and a muscular tail with what looked like a long stinger at the end. His second impression was _centaur_ for the creepily humanoid neck with an upside down triangle of a face and smooth, glassy eyes. The neck attached at shoulders to the pincers, which were growing bigger and bigger as it fell toward them, mouth hinged open wide like a snake about to devour oversized prey.

His third impressions was _Run!_

Angel grabbed the Doctor by the shoulders and yanked him backward just as the scorpion creature crashed through the glass ceiling in front of them. Thick glass pebbles showered them; a few of the sharper ones cutting skin as they fell back to the ground.

They both scrambled to their feet. The scorpion shook the glass the showered back down from its back and snapped a claw at them, which they narrowly dodged.

Angel crouched, waiting for the next attack, but the Doctor just rolled his shoulders back and lifted his chin like someone had just made a rude gesture at him and _not_ tried to kill him.

"Hello," he said. "You're one of the Krik-Tar. What are you doing on this side of the universe?"

Its claw flashed out for the Doctor's neck. The Doctor dodged to the side, the claw missing his head by a hairsbreadth with a SNAP like a telephone pole breaking. Angel leapt forward, wrapping his arms around the claw as it closed. With any luck, the claw worked on the same principles as crocodile jaws with all the power being in snapping shut instead of opening. The claw was rough, and solid as any piece of metal. Angel punched at the joint where the claw met the arm and pain shot through his knuckles. The creature didn't seem to notice the attack.

It lifted the claw Angel held closed until Angel's feet left the ground. He turned his head and found himself face to face with the creature. It had large round eyes like black marbles set into a smooth green face. Its mandibles chittered at him.

"Angel! Let go!" the Doctor shouted.

If the Doctor wanted to reason with this thing, Angel was going to kill him. It had clicked over into the monster category right after it tried to snap someone's head off. Angel turned to tell the Doctor as much and saw the flash of forest green motion. Instinctively, he pulled his legs up, wrapping them around the arm attached to the claw just as the second claw snapped shut below him.

The other claw pulled back and Angel took the Doctor's advice this time. He dropped off of the claw and tumbled away through the broken glass. He came up in a crouch.

It loomed above him, filling the space with its massive body, both claws pressing against the ragged edges of the remaining tunnel glass. It struck, its tail arching out through the hole it had crashed through and crashing into the glass above Angel's head. A spiderweb of cracks spread out from the spot.

The Doctor shouted something: an odd series of chittering clicks that Angel was going to assume was the Doctor trying to reason with a giant scorpion. Angel scrambled backwards, trying to stay ahead of the snapping claws. The metal supports for the bridge groaned under the weight of the monster as it tried to chase after Angel and the Doctor. It barely fit into the tunnel and its tail caught on the remaining roof and it would spend a few precious seconds smashing more glass before it advanced on them again.

"We have to run," the Doctor said.

"You think?" Angel shot back. He didn't even have a sword on him. And this was a less-than-ideal place for a fight. Run to weapons, run to better ground, run to-

Angel narrowed his eyes at something near the monster's neck. Something small and round and blinking red. Angel's eyes scanned the green body and found what he was looking for: seams. This was armor.

Overall, armor was bad. Very bad. But armor had weaknesses, and it was generally the same, no matter the body shape.

"You're not running!" The Doctor grabbed the collar of Angel's leather jacket and hauled on it, trying to drag Angel back towards the electronics store.

"Doctor," Angel said, stumbling backward with the Doctor's pull. "What's your policy on blinking red buttons?"

"Press 'em," the Doctor said immediately. "And run. Did I mention the running? That's a Krik-Tar warrior in full battle armor and he's not willing to talk this out."

More glass shattered over their heads. Angel shoved the Doctor away. "You run. I'll follow."

Angel leapt up and over another snapping claw. He landed inside the swing of the claws, but in dangerous proximity to the front two legs and bulk of the creature's body, with which it seemed perfectly happy to try and crush him.

Angel scrambled to stay ahead of the creature, waiting for the right timing and then jumped for the red button. Inches away he heard a sickening _snap_. His leg went numb and he suddenly jerked in the opposite direction. Angel found himself dangling upside down, looking into the creature's empty black eyes. It snarled and its feet clattered against the metal bridge as it backed up. Wind hit Angel in the face as they exited into the open air.

The creature turned its head slightly to the east.

"No," Angel said, holding up his hands, "wait-"

It tossed him into the night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

The Doctor ran. Scrambling through the entertainment store they had passed earlier, he hoped desperately for a plan to jump out at him from the electronics. Screen games, Virtual Reality, an exercise tube, Palm rings and bracelets, more elaborate virtual reality: none of it was of particular use again the Krik-Tar crashing behind him.

He spotted a sign for the far exit of the store pointing left, so he skidded around a display of VIRY Gloves and made for it.

"Stairs. Small. Structurally sound. Stairs. Where Krik-Tar don't fit."

Behind him, the Krik-Tar in question shrieked with rage. It was a mindless sound, high pitched and wordless.

He dodged to the left, down an aisle of shimmering display holograms. Holograms, thankfully, had yet to become solid, so the Doctor dashed blindly through them, assuming he wouldn't crash into any customers on the other side of them. Crashing would be bad, but dodging around the holograms would just be silly.

One of the shelves up ahead toppled over, boxes and displays scattering like a minefield in front of him. The Krik-Tar appeared on top of the wreckage and the Doctor skidded to a stop and 180-ed away again. Next aisle, then. Next aisle seemed good.

The next aisle had game cards, which were fantastically organized until the Krik-Tar bowled them over, too. This time, though, it had appeared behind him, and the Doctor ran faster. He reached the end and turned to the right. There! The door to the stairs, its sign glowing like a beacon just a few meters down at the end of all the aisles.

With another huge crash, the remaining shelves nearest the door topped over one after the other, the last one coming to a heavy stop against the frame of the emergency exit. He'd never be able to pick that shelf up. The Doctor skidded to a halt, breathing hard as he stared for a moment at the blocked door. Maybe he could-

He ducked instively as a huge shadow leapt for him and it passed right overhead, claws clicking in his ears.

The Doctor turned. The Krik-Tar landed and turned, too, and they faced each other for a long, terrible, trapped moment.

The Krik-Tar opened its claws wide.

* * *

Angel came to under crushing pain and chaos. This time, he had not managed to be sneaky about being thrown in the air, bouncing off of several cars, and finally rolling to a stop as a bleeding mess on the sidewalk. People had noticed.

Sirens blared around him, people were screaming and running, and the only two who actually stopped to see if he was okay once it was established that there was some monster-or-terrorist-or-something up on that crosswalk over there, were William and Judith Cole. At this point, Angel would know that 9-year-old boy's sobs anywhere.

Tears dripped off the kid's face warmly (and a bit grossly) onto Angel's cheeks and nose. Angel's eyes squinted open. William was shaking Angel's shoulder, which hurt, and calling his name loudly, which also hurt, and the boy's mother seemed to be trying to pull him back to stop the hurt from continuing.

Angel's eyes opened reluctantly the rest of the way.

"Angel!" William cried. "You're alive!"

"Of course I'm-" Angel started to reply groggily, but he didn't know how to finish the sentence, since both "alive" and "not alive" were applicable. He grunted instead and pushed himself to a sitting position, every muscle cramping in pain like he'd been through a meat tenderizer.

Yup, definitely should have run.

William quickly stood, offering Angel both hands to help him the rest of the way up. The gesture (God help him) was kind of adorable. Angel hesitated and then took the kid's hands; not for actual support, of course, but because it seemed rude not to take them.

There was a tentative hand on his back and Angel realized that Mrs. Cole was trying to offer her support, too.

Damn it.

Using mostly his own bruised muscles, Angel pulled himself upward with a sharp exhale and the very fires of hell engulfed his left leg. He yelled, collapsing against a car next to them.

"Angel!" William cried again. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing," Angel replied, gasping hard because it helped ease the pain as he propped himself against the car's hood. "I'm just pretty sure my leg's broken. Shit."

Swearing had the same healing effect as gasping in air. It was medically proven for vampires, Angel was sure.

"Do you need a hospital?" Mrs. Cole asked. Her hand hovered like she wasn't sure if she should continue to support him or let him brave through it alone.

Angel shook his head. He'd be fine in about a week. He tested his weight on the injured leg and cried out again. Maybe two weeks.

"You need a hospital," Mrs. Cole said, tapping her Palm to life on her hand to call for an ambulance. Devices like smartphones still existed and were called "Palms," but now they came with wearable accessories - either a ring or a bracelet - which projected the screen onto the wearer's palm, fully interactable and everything. As far as Angel was concerned, it was magic, and he wouldn't have one himself except that it came with the device when he bought it. And now he found that the wide gold band of the ring actually looked good on his middle finger and it was wonderfully convenient to check the time with a single tap to the ring instead of fishing for the device in his pocket.

"No," Angel insisted through deep gasps, "really. Don't call. Sirens are coming anyway. Hear that? I'm fine. I'll be fine. You guys should go."

It suddenly hit Angel exactly what the situation was. He looked up toward the crosswalk he'd been thrown from. It was...ridiculously far away. Neither the monster nor the Doctor were there, though, which made sense by this point. Angel had to find them. And William and his mother had to get out of there.

"Nope," William's tiny voice came from below Angel's gaze, and he looked down. "We're taking you to the hospital."

"Actually, you're going home," Angel told him, and then looked at Mrs. Cole, who would be his ally in this. "There's a...thing running loose. A demon. Maybe that's obvious…" He glanced at the crosswalk. "But it's not safe out here."

Her grey-blue eyes widened with realization as she put all the pieces together. "Do you know where?" Her tone was even, but her voice hid a tremble that minutely shook even her dark, loosely curled hair that framed her face.

Angel shook his head. "I have a guy on it." He hoped. The Doctor might have been thrown out the other side. "Go home. Now."

Mrs. Cole nodded and took William's hand, who protested loudly that he wanted to help Angel get to the hospital.

"Kid," Angel growled. He pushed himself up from the car and the fire blazed anew in his legs. "Oh, _ffff- grrmmm_ ," Angel would later congratulate himself on his presence of mind to swallow the f-bomb in front of the kid (and his mother).

"Look," he said when he could again, "do you want to get eaten?" A warrior was not likely to be looking for human flesh to eat, but Angel had noticed that both boys had a morbid fascination with getting eaten. It seemed to scare them delightfully more than stories about ghosts or demons who wanted to destroy the world. Given that William was almost eaten himself before Angel intervened, he supposed it made sense.

William's eyes widened with fearful interest.

"This thing is hungry," Angel told him, lowering his voice to Scary Storyteller Mode. "And you'd make a great snack."

His expression had convinced Mrs. Cole, at least. She wrapped her arms tightly around William and picked him up. He had just turned 9, but he was short for his age, and Mrs. Cole hardly huffed as her strong arms lifted him. They caught eyes briefly before she turned and carried William away, who watched Angel over his mother's shoulder without protest.

Angel turned the other direction, toward the destroyed crosswalk. "And now, ladies and gentlemen," he winced as he hopped forward on his right leg. "Watch as I kill this son of a bitch before your very eyes."

He hopped again.

* * *

Fortunately, Time Lords' lives didn't pass before their eyes before they died. It would take so long, and the Doctor was not in the mood for a jumbled mess of boring, boring, too exciting, pain, pain, pain, _this._

Everything slowed down, though. That perfect mixture of a mind that could work at staggering speeds on a normal day, a superfuel of adrenaline, and a twinge of something that was not quite the ability to actually slow down time.

The Krik-Tar's claw opened like a crocodile jaw: full of enough potential energy to snap shut and cut through all the bones, muscles, and internal organs that made up the Doctor's body and still have force enough left over for several telephone poles when it was done. It would also ruin his new leather jacket, which had only just started to fit right. The Doctor needed an escape and tried to force his mind to reflect on options that didn't involve his skull being crushed, but all it left him with was a snide, _this is it_ , and the hazy memory of a voice saying, "That's your punishment: If you do this, you'll survive."

He was going to die, and he couldn't so much as bring himself to close his eyes while it happened.

"It is your fault," the Krik-Tar clicked.

The Doctor blinked. He looked from the claw that would kill him to the face of the soldier and his black, glassy eyes (the Krik-Tar actually had composite eyes, but the eye shields on their helmets were smooth and singular; eerie to foes of their own kind). Behind his face, his tail and poised stinger twitched like a finger on a gun. His whole body trembled with barely controlled rage and - the Doctor suddenly realized as he noticed how the Krik-Tar's legs shifted and skittered under him - hurt.

The Doctor opened his mouth to deny everything like a child standing over a broken lamp with a cricket bat. _No, it's not. It can't be. I didn't know. There wasn't a choice. You have to understand. I'm not. They don't exist. I don't exist. Please._

He managed to shake his head and mouth the word, "No," if not give it air to be audible.

The claw moved and the Doctor was pleased to find that he cringed enough to close his eyes.

The click of feet on the tiled floor. The heavy _thuwack_ of claw snapping shut. A strangled shout.

But no pain.

The Doctor opened one eye. The Krik-Tar was still in front of him, but now it was locked in battle with another of its kind.

Or… He opened his other eye. Less battle. More locked.

The other Krik-Tar was smaller. A natural armourless brown instead of shiny metallic green. If he could remember his alien body types, female, too. In spite of being smaller, less armored, and clearly not a soldier, she had brought her own claw between him the soldier. The claws met, separated, met again, shaking with effort against each other.

"Kom! Stop! It's me."

Kom. The Doctor logged the name away for later and started to slide his way along the wall. He could run, but he wouldn't be able to get far in an open space against the larger, faster Krik-Tar. The exit sign still glowed over the toppled shelves that braced against the door frame. He'd never be able to move them. He-

Was an idiot.

Kom thrashed his tail threateningly. It made the new Krik-Tar flinch away from the violence of it, but it didn't touch her. In a fight between a fully armed soldier and a much smaller, untrained civilian, any attack that didn't hit was more likely due to design of the attacker than any successful defense of the civilian.

 _Well,_ the Doctor thought, _at least he's making threats now instead of stabbing me through the head._ The Doctor inched along the wall beside the arch of the female Krik-Tar's tail.

"Don't you know what that is?" Kom shrieked.

The Doctor flinched at the following silence.

"That's a Time Lord!"

The Doctor ran for the EMERGENCY EXIT. _Yes_ , he thought in his panic, _both of those things apply_. When he got there he bent and ducked under the shelf, feeling for the bar to open the door and throwing his weight against it when he found it. Emergency exits opened _outward_ by design. Probably to save idiots like himself in this sort of emergency.

He flung himself down the first flight of stairs, his hand clinging to the railing, barely keeping his feet under him as he rounded the corner to the next flight. Above him he could hear a crash and shriek of metal as the shelves were flung away from the door. He rounded another flight and heard claws scraping against the metal walls.

 _He can't fit_.

Another flight. More scraping.

 _Please don't let him fit._

A scream of frustration from above.

The Doctor burst through the ground level door and dashed off down the street as fast as his legs would take him.

* * *

This kind of morbid curiosity was going to kill him.

The flashing lights made it easy to find the spot where Angel had landed. Two full city blocks away. The Doctor skirted the edge of the crowd of rubberneckers, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. The ongoing conversation wasn't anything useful, just an endless loop of "What happened?" and "I don't know, I just got here," and "I think someone jumped."

He shoved his way forward through the crowd until he spotted the crumpled hood of a car, and the blood on the sidewalk.

No body.

But they would have taken it away...

Unless the impact caused said body to explode into dust.

He squinted at the asphalt. It didn't look _that_ bloody. The Doctor let out a frustrated sigh. If Angel was dead, he should be getting on with the situation at hand. And possibly just give up on talking to anyone ever again.

If Angel had survived, the Doctor owed him finding out that he'd survived. Maybe an apology.

Suddenly feeling the pressure of the crowd around him, the Doctor started shoving his way back through the jumble of humans toward the relative isolation of an alley he could see looming like a dark cave just beyond them.

A numbness like knowing settled in his chest. No, Angel hadn't survived. Not that he'd known the vampire particularly well, but he hadn't hated Angel's company either. Given the short line of people willing to put up with him right now, that had meant more to the Doctor than he'd realized until it was tossed two blocks from a bridge.

He was suddenly aware of the rhythm of his pulse rushing through his ears. The _whish-whish whish-whish_ that was making him feel lightheaded.

He almost fell out of the crowd and forced himself to turn around and stare at them. Thirty-six people. None of them particularly cared about his bad day, but they would care about being cut in half by giant alien claws.

One of these problems he could solve.

He took a deep breath and turned away. Stepping into the nearby alley, he nearly tripped over someone sitting just outside the line of light from the emergency vehicles around the corner.

"I'm only going to say this once," the someone-with-Angel's-voice said, "so don't get used to it. You were right. We should have run."

The Doctor felt the smile stretching across his face. Folding his arms across his chest, the leather of his sleeves creaking, he said, "Of course I was."

"Just this once, though," Angel repeated. The Doctor had noticed earlier that Angel's accent had changed since last time: it was gently Irish now, when it had been distinctly American before. Shifting to local languages made sense, and normally the Doctor might have marked the shift in accent as a curious almost-eccentricity, but _he_ shifted accents all the time, so...

As the Doctor's eyes adjusted to the light, he could see that Angel's expression was more pained than his voice let on. "Thing is, I'm having a hard time with things like running right now. And standing." Angel winced again as the Doctor moved closer. "And hell, sitting's not so great, either."

So Angel wasn't just waiting around for the Doctor to show up. He squinted at Angel and noted he had stretched out his left leg in front of him. The fabric of his trousers was dark, but the fabric below the knee was torn and stuck wetly to his leg. So not unharmed, then. The Doctor crouched next to Angel, pulling out his sonic screwdriver and scanning near the torn fabric. "You're lucky it didn't cut the whole leg off," he said. "Also, good news: There are two."

"Oh, fantastic," Angel said. "One for each of us. Can you do me a favor, though, and tell the other one to come to me? Save me the walk."

The Doctor tucked the screwdriver into his jacket pocket and gently peeled back the fabric to reveal a deep gash. On a human, the bleeding would have been terrible; possibly fatal. On Angel, the blood oozed thickly from the wound in a lazy imitation of human circulation. He could make out the muscle below the skin.

"Will do. The second I find her. I'm thinking she might be willing to discuss what they're even doing on this planet." The Doctor gave the gash in Angel's leg another once-over and added, "Turn on your side, let me see the back."

Angel glowered like the Doctor had asked him to play three rounds of tennis. The Doctor was about to suggest that maybe they should just make a trip out to the emergency vehicles (something Angel was clearly avoiding) when Angel's expression shifted. The anger softened into something. A half a smile that disappeared under a furrowed brow and turned into...regret? Not for his injury, but directed at the Doctor. Angel looked away as he shifted gingerly onto his right side.

"They're aliens?"

"Well they're not Welsh," the Doctor said. As he suspected, the gash on the back of Angel's leg was deeper than the one on the front. This is where the top of the claw would have snapped shut. He could see the white glint of bone at the center of the wound.

The Doctor continued, "But what are they doing here? That species is from the Saltek Cluster. Clear on the other side of the universe. No one in that galaxy has space technology to get to the next planet let alone to _this_ planet. And if they did, why here? Last I heard they were pretty deep in a world war." Of course, that war had only been a small part of a much, much larger war.

The Doctor stood up and stepped over Angel's broken leg.

"Hey!"

"Be right back," the Doctor told him. He flashed a smile and added. "Don't run off."

He heard Angel's growl turn into a grumble as the Doctor strode back into the more crowded sidewalk. He lifted his chin, added a bit of swagger to his steps and climbed into the first ambulance he came across.

"Hey! You can't be-" the medic behind him started to protest. The Doctor shoved his psychic paper into the medic's face and thought, _I'm a very important hospital official_.

"...Sir?" the medic finished, blinking at the paper in confusion.

"I need to borrow these." The Doctor shoved antiseptic, medi-skin, a foam-brace, and, after a bit of digging around, painkillers into his jacket pocket.

He jumped out of the ambulance before the medic got around to, "But, Mr. Aisner, what are you doing here?"

To prevent the medic from following, the Doctor walked quickly away in the opposite direction of the alley Angel was in. He lost himself in the crowd and then looped back around to the alley in the time it took for the medic to become distracted again by more pressing matters.

Angel watched the emptying of the medical supplies from the Doctor's pockets with growing incredulity at how much he'd been able to stuff in there. The Doctor himself might feel incredulous about that (Angel had _been_ in the TARDIS), but humans always seemed to be amazed when presented with new versions of the bigger-on-the-inside technology. He was tired of being incredulous about it and preferred to ignore it instead.

"Couldn't fit a bottle of whiskey in there too?" Angel asked, a little dryly.

The Doctor tossed the painkillers at Angel's face.

Angel caught the bottle deftly in one hand and eyed the label. "That'll do."

The Doctor grunted in amusement. Yeah, that would. He felt the slightest twinge of longing and crushed it before it could grow into a thought. He set to work cleaning the gashes in Angel's leg. Angel tapped a few of the pills into his hand and swallowed them dry, wincing both in pain at the Doctor's ministrations and the discomfort of the pills in his throat as they went down.

Angel shoved the bottle of pills into his coat pocket and swore at a particularly painful splash of antiseptic.

"I don't need that," Angel said. "I'm a vampire. I magically don't rot."

Aside from _magically don't rot_ being the most absurd argument the Doctor had heard in the last few hours ( _I have to take care of my boyfriend_ still held the title for the day), he was already done. The Doctor rested his arm on his upright knee and looked over it directly at Angel. "Want me to take it off?" he asked.

Angel glowered at the Doctor for a moment, but then lowered his eyes. The Doctor went back to work.

"Once we get this sorted, I'll drop you off at a pub," the Doctor promised, pulling the trigger of the medi-skin gun and running the line of thin, sterile foam along the gash, where it adhesed and dried in seconds. "Or your home..." He nudged Angel's leg to get him to twist sideways again so he could get at the back. Angel did with a grunt.

"No, no," Angel grumbled. "I'll come with. Just give us a hand up."

"What are you going to do, bite his ankles?" the Doctor asked, but he moved to Angel's side when he was done with the back, setting the medi-skin gun down. Angel slipped an arm over his shoulders and the Doctor wrapped a supportive arm around Angel's back. They stood together with a loud grunt of pain from Angel, and then he hopped experimentally with the Doctor's support. Angel nodded. It would do. They moved forward, deeper into the alley.

"I heal fast," Angel explained. "And I have a high pain tolerance. I'm expecting to at least be able to bite his knees."

The Doctor barked out a laugh.

"So?" Angel asked as they awkwardly hop-stepped their way forward. "What's your patented non-violent plan?"

That...was suspicious. Last time the Doctor had seen Angel, he'd spent some time hitting people in the head with a gong striker. Soul-sucking people, but that didn't make it less violent. And before that he'd blown up a planet. Not that Angel knew that. He swallowed.

"If we find that other Krik-Tar, I bet we could get her to explain some of the details of how they got here in the first place." Time Storm, maybe?

Angel grunted, though part of that might have been the next hop forward. "As far as plans go, I've heard better."

"What's wrong with my plan?" The Doctor pulled his neck back to give Angel an appalled look.

"Details?" Angel scrunched up his face. "We don't need details, we need a convincing argument for why they should go back and never return. _My_ most convincing argument is violence…"

Actually, now that Angel mentioned it… "Violence might be why they left," the Doctor said.

"Huh?"

"Like I said, last time I was there most of the planet was at war. They might be refugees." The Doctor focused on stepping them around a pile of debris overflowing from a long-neglected dumpster. "They might not have a home to go back to."

"A warrior refugee?" Angel asked dubiously.

"There are lots of reasons to run away," the Doctor said.

"Alright, say that's true," Angel agreed. They came to a T and turned right. "Why'd it attack _us_? Street full of people would've been easier than all that glass-smashing. Plus: it sucks at keeping a low profile if it's trying to hide from something."

Those were two excellent questions. The Doctor had no intention of answering either of them with his current working theory of _They really don't like me_ _and are willing to risk life and liberty to express that dislike._ For one thing, he could be wrong and if that were the case, he wasn't going to risk being wrong out loud. For another thing, he wasn't going to explain to this vampire what a Time Lord was and what a Time War was and how sometimes scars just kept cutting deeper.

"That's what I want to find out," the Doctor said. "The other Krik-Tar will hopefully answer those questions. She was a lot more chatty." Chatty being relative, but the Doctor didn't care to elaborate in it.

"Oh. A chatty homicidal alien. Great. So where is she?"

"I have no idea."

Angel sighed, which was cut short by another grunt of pain. One hop and a muffled curse later, he said, "Screw that. You know what helps me heal faster? Whiskey."

The Doctor shot a look over at Angel, who was valiantly trying to hide his grimaces of pain. Maybe if he fed Angel enough shots, he would agree to stay behind and out of harm's way.

"Then let's get you some," he agreed.

* * *

The Dragon's Crown was a roughly 450-year-old pub in the northwest corner of Old Galway's city center. The establishment had survived the centuries of change largely in thanks to its most change-averse patrons: the vampires and demons that dwelled in the city's (both literal and metaphorical) underground.

During the day, it was like any other charming old establishment. It served food and drink to the human patrons, hosted live local bands, and boasted real waiters and real wooden fixtures to attract the tourists looking for an authentic Irish pub experience.

By midnight, though, after the kitchens had closed and the normal day staff had gone home, Marty would come in for his night shift as bartender, along with a few, often transient co-workers. Turn over for the night shift was high, given the often difficult nature of the customers, but Marty was just about to celebrate his third year there, and that made his night shift seniority second only to the owner's.

Marty had been offered the position of manager more than once already, but he found that he enjoyed being on the floor. He knew the regulars and was unafraid of the irregulars, and had found that he was most useful bridging the gap between the new customers and new co-workers. It was something of a sisyphean task, but one he kind of enjoyed.

Marty was young and had an unassuming face that lent itself more to blending in than standing out. His nose and teeth were too big to make him handsome, but his features too symmetrical and skin too smooth to make him homely. His black hair was always short and neat, though his work shirts - from graphic tees to loose, plain, long sleeves - could never seem to get fully clean. He'd come to Galway and the Dragon's Crown when he was 18, and of his history before that, only Marty ever knew.

It had been a slow night when Angel and the new one came in. It was Tuesday, but days of the week hardly mattered to creatures who didn't keep a normal 9-5. Angel was injured and used his companion for support over to Marty's end of the counter. Marty's end was farther from the door than Barbara's, but Angel always came to Marty's end.

Angel had been a regular since before Marty's time, and at first, Angel had been rather sour toward him. Gina, the manager at the time, had rolled her eyes when Angel had glowered and turned away with his scotch at their first introduction, and said something scathing about patrons who thought that they owned the place just because they'd been there longer.

It didn't bother Marty, though. It wasn't like _he_ owned the place, either.

Eventually, after Marty had made it clear that he was sticking around, Angel had started to become friendlier toward him. One night, he slipped Marty a bigger tip than usual and asked if he'd heard anything about a flock of Fowleys nesting nearby, and Marty took it as a sign of welcome to the Dragon's Crown family.

And they were a family, in a way. Marty quickly learned the circles of groups that formed like generations of cousins, no more and no less beholden to each other except by thin ties of camaraderie through their ancestor, The Dragon's Crown. Angel and a few others as isolated and lonely as he slid between groups at will. Like a cousin by marriage, never fully belonging as the others, but a space was made anyway.

Angel's new companion surprised Marty for a second - as a bartender to demons, he'd learned to be transient himself and never to dwell anything but the facts in front of his eyes and leaking into his ears. Marty had assumed that most of Angel's friends were from the Dragon's Crown, based his tendency to look lost if the answers he sought weren't to be found in the pub.

Clearly, Marty had been wrong. He finished polishing a pint glass and put it away. Then he picked up a bottle of Angel's favorite scotch whiskey and went to meet Angel and the new guy.

"Make it a double, Marty," Angel told him through a grimace as he sat down on one of the stools.

Marty nodded and poured him a double. Angel had nearly finished it by the time Marty was done asking his companion, "And for you, sir?" He refilled Angel's drink.

"Same."

Marty nodded and poured the man a double. "Should I leave the bottle, sir?" he asked Angel, who nodded even though he was sipping through this one at a more reasonable pace. "Very good."

Marty left the bottle and turned to resume polishing the pints by the sink.

"Hang on Marty," Angel said, and Marty turned back questioningly. "You haven't heard anything about Trik-Kans around here, have you?"

"Krik-Tars," the other man corrected with a roll of his eyes.

"Right," Angel agreed, looking intently at Marty.

"Krik-Tars?" Marty frowned and shook his head. "I'm afraid not, sir. Unless you're talking about thing that destroyed the crosswalk over Castlepark 'bout an hour ago. Folks are saying something about scorpion men."

"That's them," Angel said. "Are they saying where they're nesting?"

"'Fraid not, sir," Marty replied. "Though I have heard folk say that down by the eastern banks of Lough Atalia's attracting the homeless under-folk on account of the nice beaches and lots of sewer access."

Angel and the other man shared a look.

"Might be worth checking out," Angel said.

The other man agreed cheerily enough, but Marty caught the wrinkle around his eyes that said that he was agreeing mostly because he didn't have any better ideas.

"How far is it, then?" the man asked Angel. "Because if I have to keep carrying you-"

"Not far," Angel interrupted. "We passed it on the way, just on the other side of Atalia Bridge."

"The other side of the…" Angel's friend said incredulously, and Marty thought with good reason. That was close to a kilometer away: not bad on two good feet, but if they moved as slowly as they had across the pub, Marty thought it was a miracle they'd made it at all.

"Will that be all, sir?" Marty asked. Angel nodded, and Marty left to finish the crate of pints.

There were machines to do this sort of thing now, of course, and most of Marty's co-workers used them. But the machines were back in the kitchen, and Marty preferred to stay up front. Besides, when nights were slow, what else would he do? The glasses were becoming familiar like friends to him: that one was chipped on the bottom, and this one's decal for a brewery across town was wearing off. The glass had clouded on another and made it look perpetually unwashed. No one seemed to be able to clear it, but the hologram logo of lascivious women on the front was a favorite among patrons, awarding the random customer the prize of awe and envy for the night, so the Dragon's Crown staff kept it.

Marty listened while he polished, mostly because he found it interesting, but now also because it made him of value to his customers. Marty was under no illusions about the danger of his job - it was why so many people left so soon after starting - and being valuable gave the patrons pause before accosting him about something. Marty had no particular concern for his own safety, but it was nice to be valued, wasn't it?

He listened to a pair of vampires quietly discussing something by the window. He couldn't hear most of their words, except he did make out "yellow," "he didn't want," and "said they...for everything with...and...the sky" (or possibly, "this guy").

Marty listened to the blonde-haired woman he knew only as _Sionnach_ muttering to herself by the far wall as she glared at Angel like she wanted nothing more than to strangle him with her hands so hard that she'd squeeze his head right off. Marty couldn't make out any coherent words from her - some of the inflections even sounded Japanese to him - but the intensity of her mutterings were fun to listen to.

He listened to Barbara chatting with her boyfriend through the practically-invisible phone bud settled in one ear. They weren't supposed to use phone buds or Palms at work, but it made no difference to Marty. He listened to her talk about their plans for going out to the country that weekend until their plans started to include things that they'd like to do to each other, and then he switched to listening to Angel and his friend.

Angel's friend was perched on the edge of the barstool, a touch away from standing again. "What I want to know," he said, tapping a finger on the textured glass of scotch, "is how they got here."

"Spaceship?" Angel suggested, seeming much more interesting in his drink than spaceships.

"The Krik-Tar are a species that live underground. Their hell is in the sky."

Marty raised an eyebrow and slipped the now clean glass on the shelf under the bar counter. He would have pegged Angel's friend for more of a soldier with his stubble haircut and confident presence. He hadn't been expecting an argument based on another species' culture.

"Which means," the man continued, "they don't like space travel. Also, they don't have the technology to travel this far if they _were_ inclined. Like I said."

Twisting and leaning against the bar counter on one elbow, Angel tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the wood. "Magic…" he said, though it seemed to be more of a thought spoken out loud than a suggestion. Marty heard a lot of thoughts-spoken-out-loud in his line of work.

The man clicked his tongue and lifted his glass. It almost touched his lips, but he shook his head and set it back on the bar. "Or...what if they managed to copy a wormhole?"

"Wormhole," the tone sounded almost derisive. "You mean like an interdimensional portal?"

"Yeah!" The man leapt to his feet, grinning a wide toothy smile. "You drop out of this universe, skirt the edges of the void and jump back in somewhere completely different." He leaned on the counter next to Angel, leaning in conspiratorially. "Not that it's a great way to travel, mind you. The void isn't a friendly place and to have any hope of controlling where you're going you need some serious know-how."

"So you're saying they're practitioners."

The smile flickered out. He turned away from Angel in an almost full circle until he faced the bar. His hand found his glass of scotch again, twisting it so that the liquid caught the light. "I think I know where they got it."

"It?" Angel asked. "The spell?"

He hunched his shoulders, hunkering down into the leather jacket. "Yeah. The spell."

"Liar," Angel accused, also hunching over his drink. "You don't believe in magic." He finished off his drink and poured another.

"Of course I believe in magic!" he objected. The tension in the man's shoulders relaxed and he waved his glass of scotch at Angel. "When there's magic. I also believe that magic is often used to describe phenomena that people have yet to explain scientifically. This isn't real magic, but I'll happily call it that if it makes this easier."

"I survived the technological revolution," Angel said, not sounding too happy about it. "I'll call it whatever it is."

"Then let's say that I suspect that they're using a bastardized version of an Emergency Temporal Shift Unit. Or maybe just a stolen one."

Angel rubbed his forehead like he had a headache. "Yeah, let's just say it's magic."

Angel's friend looked over at Marty and rolled his eyes with a "Can you believe what I put up with?" air. Marty smiled and nodded back. He tipped the glass he was cleaning at Angel's friend's still untasted drink and raised an eyebrow, questioning whether he maybe wanted a different drink.

Angel's friend shook his head. Marty turned away at least to give the impression of being an equal opportunity eavesdropper. Barbara rushed passed him saying something about taking an early break.

"So," Angel's friend continued, "I think that the Krik-Tar are copying this spell off of another group of...things." He lifted the scotch to his mouth and drank the whole thing at once. He winced and set the glass back on the counter.

"Any idea which things?" Angel asked, immediately refilling the glass.

"Nah." The man shoved his hands into his pockets. "But I'd like to find out how many of these spells they have and if they plan to make it a habit of popping over to other planets in full battle armour."

Marty had glanced up at the "Nah," and Angel made a suspicious expression to match Marty's thoughts. Angel did not pursue it, though, and Marty picked up his next glass.

"I can ask around," Angel offered. "I know a few people who might know."

"Good. You do that and I'll pop over to the banks of Lough Atalia and have a poke around," Angel's friend said, pushing the second glass of whiskey along the bar counter to Angel.

"Leaving me behind," Angel finished.

"That might be part of it, yeah." Angel's friend said, but he didn't walk off, like he was either expected or waiting for an objection.

"So if I'm hearing you right," Angel said slowly, making sure he had every aspect of this plan down. "You're going to go try to find these things - alone - reason with them, somehow get them out of my city...and all I have to do is sit back and drink scotch?"

There was a moment of silence between them.

"I'm trying to find the catch," Angel finally said.

The man smiled a quick flash of teeth that pulled his ears up. "No catch." He plucked his whiskey from the bar and raised it at Angel. "Thanks."

Angel raised his and they _clinked_ gently.

The beer pint that Marty put away _clinked_ gently, too.

* * *

Tinik, High Priestess of the Deep Caverns of Vabr, survivor of the nine wars and crosser of the Open Expanse, was terrified of heights.

As someone who had been born, raised, trained, and earned her position in an endless series of closed, comfortable tunnels, she hadn't known this about herself until Kom had run away from her, pursuing the Time Lord by climbing down the slick side of this great metal structure.

She had managed to climb up here, she told herself, and so should be able to get down. At the time, she had been so focused on finding Kom that the vastness of the dark above her hadn't served as sufficient warning and now, some of the openness of the sky was _below_ her like an enormous trap.

A single leg reached out into that vastness, feeling for the dent in the slick metal that Kom had left when he made his descent. Finding it, she leaned her body out and took in the deep emptiness below her; she nearly fell from the shock of the sight. She had to fight every instinct not to retreat back to the relative safety of the shattered walkway.

But she must persevere. She had to save Kom from his suicidal goal of attacking a Time Lord. They were devious, powerful and, worst of all, unpredictable creatures; slinking out from between cracks in reality to pull the world from beneath their feet. With this in mind, she reached down with another leg and found the next foothold.

It might already be too late, she knew. Kom had attacked a Time Lord, and she had hoped that she would be able to keep him from ever coming in contact with such an evil creature. Would a Time Lord let such a blatant threat to one of their own pass without retaliation? She had to hope that they would. If not, then their world would burn again.

In some ways it was still burning in the minds of its people. That was why they had sent out soldiers to fight the Time Lords even as their own war had come to a close. She remembered the terrors of that war and the Time Lord lies so sweet they made her want to fight even now. But she also remembered days of peace; something that Kom and her people had lost.

So if the Time Lords would retaliate, that would leave her with only one option: to help Kom kill this Time Lord before he could call back to his people for help.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N -** Apologies for the delay! We've both finally come up for air, so the next two chapters shouldn't take nearly as long to post. They're written, they just need some editing. Thanks for your patience!

 **Chapter Three**

The Doctor jumped over the low stone wall that sat across the street from the Dragon's Crown pub. A grassy park with a low grey building (a community playhouse, according to Marty) hunkered a little way down a path to his right. His feet crunched down on the first fallen leaves of autumn as he strolled across the lawn. If Marty's directions were accurate, there would be a bridge on the other side of the playhouse which would take him to the east side of Lough Atalia.

When it was first built, Atalia Bridge would have been a feat of engineering. It would have been a new synthetic material of the time (about 50- no, 53 years ago), with the strength of steel but the flexibility of plexiglass. It had no supports its entire span of 180 meters except for the short platforms at each end to raise it above the water. The material had the look of frosted glass that glowed with a soft white light and was pressure-activated, so nocturnal pedestrians had light as they walked.

The Doctor paused briefly in the middle of the bridge, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. A strong autumn breeze blew in, tasting of salt from the ocean with a sharp bite of burning fuel from the shipyard to the east.

Rose would have liked it here.

Assuming that she didn't get thrown off a building earlier in the night.

Assuming she didn't know about how the Krik-Tar got here. And why it wouldn't speak to him.

The Doctor grunted, a noise of agreement with an invisible companion. "So," he said to himself, "what are you going to do about it?"

The sea air gusted around him.

"I'm going to save the world," he answered, and continued across the bridge.

* * *

Along with swearing and breathing heavily, whiskey was another scientifically-proven vampiric medicinal. Especially single-malt Highland scotch whiskey at least 18 years aged. Angel was feeling much better already.

The glass of blood that Marty offered him probably helped, too. Less dizzy, less famished, and more relaxed-bordering-on-pleasantly-numb, Angel lingered over the bottle of scotch while he waited for demons he knew to wander in.

There was a vampire he needed to catch to calmly admonish (punch) for sending a violently irate demon to Angel for a simple location spell, who had then ended up throwing half of Angel's prized Very Old Books collection all over his flat. And then the demon hadn't even paid Angel for helping him.

There was a bovine-like Crudgmunger demon that Angel needed to confer with about a smuggling scheme to transport contraband through Angel's section of town to the docks. Angel had no problem with the scheme itself; he just wanted to make sure he got paid for his part in it. Namely, for hemming and hawing importantly before sullenly agreeing, and then adding some advice on good hiding places and empty tunnels that they could use.

And now there were a few others he could watch for who might know something about this Scorpion Warrior that had just broken Angel's leg.

The first two Angel had jerked his head at to come over to talk to him knew about as much as Angel did about the Krik-Tar situation. Then Angel agreed not to punch the vampire who's demon friend had thrown Angel's books everywhere in exchange for a future favor. And then the next person Angel talked to actually knew something.

Her name was Nük, and she was a diminutive, willowy wood nymph. She only spoke Ancient Greek (though Angel suspected she also spoke Ancient Gaelic and a bit of modern English and wouldn't admit it), which made conversation with her halting at best. She sipped her small glass of golden, fermented nectar with a tongue like a bee and she was dressed in autumn-colored leaves with jewelry made of cold rain. It was September, after all.

It turned out that she was friends with (or roommates with? Or lovers with?) an Evuri from the Remedian dimension (or planet? The words seemed indistinguishable in translation). Angel had never met an Evuri, but to hear Nük describe them rapidly in Ancient Greek, they were tall, thin, highly philosophical beings with pale blue skin and noses rather like Nük's tongue. And this particular Evuri _hated_ the Krik-Tar.

" _Why?_ " Angel asked Nük.

" _Because_ ," Nük huffed in irritation, her breath rustling like fall leaves in a strong breeze, " _they destroyed Safu's home in search for their enemies. She is here because she has nowhere else to live. The Krik-Tar have no care for those between themselves and their pursuit. They are evil._ "

Angel and his broken leg couldn't disagree with this.

" _All the Krik-Tar know is war_ ," Nük continued. " _And they cannot care for peace._ "

"Wait, _what?_ " Angel asked, half in English, half in Greek. " _They cannot care for peace?_ "

" _Yes_ ," Nük said simply.

Silence fell for a second while Angel tried to figure out what she meant. " _You're saying they're always at war?_ "

Nük _mmm-ed_ for a second, then said, " _They...yes, they are always at war, but when the war is over, they ignore their_ -" and then it was a word Angel didn't know. His expression must have shown his confusion because she tried to clarify, " _When war is over, where do the soldiers go?_ "

"Veterans," Angel said suddenly. Nük didn't reply, but the light in her eyes made Angel think she recognized the word as being correct.

" _The Krik-Tar are very cruel with their soldiers,_ " Nük continued darkly. " _They are trained for one purpose because they only know one: war. Violence. They kill each other and they seek their True Enemy, even now that the enemy is gone, and they will destroy themselves with the madness of an aimless life. They do not know what peace is and their people do not know how to care for it._ "

" _What enemy?_ " Angel asked.

Nük shrugged, the droplets of cold rain around her neck glistening in the warm pub light. " _They are all gone,_ " she repeated _._

" _Who?_ " Angel repeated.

Nük's face wrinkled gently in concentration. " _I think...they are family to Father Time._ "

Angel frowned. The phrase translated to "Family to Father Time," but Angel wasn't sure how literally to take that. Was she talking about mythological creatures like herself and Angel - creatures that had roots in the figure of Father Time? Or was she talking about something that had to do with the sudden reappearance in Angel's life of the Last of the Time Lords?

The coincidence seemed too strong.

" _Father Time…_ " Angel repeated slowly. " _Time Lords?_ " Actually, he'd said, "Time Kings," but he thought it was close enough. Still, he added for extra clarity, "Gallifrey?"

Biting the inside of her bottom lip, Nük thought, then nodded. " _I think so_."

Angel looked at his glass of scotch on the wooden counter, his vision as hazy as his thought processes while he worked out this new information.

" _Why are the Time Lords and the Krik-Tar enemies?_ " Angel asked.

Nük's face darkened. " _The Fathers of Time ate their peace._ "

Angel was starting to get a headache from the constant translation issues. Definitely not from the alcohol. " _They what?_ "

Nük waved a hand impatiently. _"Their peaceful past. Their peaceful future. It didn't suit."_ She tilted her head, inspecting Angel's face for some trace of understanding. " _The Fathers of Time did not like the way the Krik-Tar lived. So they altered their infancy. Now they fight. All they do is fight."_

" _The Time Lords...changed them?_ " Angel asked.

" _Yes_ ," Nük said like Angel were a slow child she was tired of trying to make understand. Her gaze shifted around the pub like looking for an excuse to go.

Taking that as his cue, Angel nodded and thanked her for her time. Nük slid off her seat like a snake into water and left for one of the other tables, leaving Angel to think alone over the remaining few sips of his whiskey.

It had been 200 years since he'd last seen the Doctor, and the Doctor had told him about the time he'd destroyed his home planet to stop a war. The Doctor, who was so friendly and pacifist that he'd tried to stop Angel from hurting even hostile creatures bent on destroying half of Earth. After the Doctor had told him about Gallifrey, Angel had been too distracted over the guilt of adding yet another victim to his own long list that he hadn't ever reconciled the two poles of who he now knew the Doctor was.

And yet, the first time Angel had met the Doctor in that field 600 years and several thousand miles away, Angel had sensed that same pole; although he couldn't have put it into words at the time. He had sensed the danger, and later, he had recognized the kinship of guilt in darkness.

And then the Doctor had changed and Angel mostly forgot about that darkness until the time Angel had threatened the Doctor under torture and death to use his mysterious magical time-and-spaceship to rescue Connor from Quor'toth. It had been a brief moment of absolute clarity which Angel could never forget, even if the exact details around the event were 200 years fuzzy.

The Doctor was a weapon.

Angel racked his brains. Did the Doctor say _when_ he had destroyed his own planet? Had this version of the Doctor already done it?

And now, Angel was also forced to ask himself, was this a thing the Time Lords were known for? The Doctor's people had changed the Krik-Tar, turned them into warriors, and the Doctor had killed his entire species. Two isn't exactly a pattern, but it did make the hairs on the back of Angel's neck stand up.

One thing was clear, though: Angel had to go. There was a Time Lord out there with a Krik-Tar on his tail, and Angel was sure he wanted to be there when the latter caught up.

* * *

The entrance to the slums of the underworld was a broken grate across a huge sewer pipe that had been a part of the city's drainage system. The pipe was large enough for the Doctor to stand in once he had stepped through the broken grate. He imagined that there must be a larger opening elsewhere for the occupants that wouldn't fit through this entrance.

"So this is where the non-humans live?" he said pleasantly into the darkness. "Not really my style." He kicked a piece of gravel, sending it splashing into the darkness. "Bit empty," he continued, strolling forward. "Wet. Echo-y. Best the humans have to offer to the likes of us."

"Stop your whining!" someone down a left pipe shrieked.

The Doctor grinned. "Right. Sorry!"

"Shut up!"

The Doctor took the right tunnel.

As he worked his way deeper into the tunnel, he found more and more of the population. A small scurrying creature that he couldn't identify rushed past him. Several human-looking people (vampires?) eyed him hungrily as they passed. Finally he paused near a small greenish grey person with spikes jutting out of a dirty white t-shirt who sat in a small alcove bent intently over a single burner camping stove. A piece of meat lay sizzling and hissing on the burner. The Doctor sniffed the air and guessed cat.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully. "I'm looking for a friend of mine, do you know where the larger accommodations are? I'm thinking size of a car at least."

Without looking up from his dinner, the greenish person thrust out a long, clawed hand, pointing back the way the Doctor had come. "First left. Ten meters. Third left. Right. Keep going 'till you're there. Don't wake up Gladys. She's a bitch."

"Thanks. Uhh...who's Gladys?"

"The bitch down that hall. Don't wake her up."

"Ah. Great. Thanks."

The greenish person flipped over his cat steak.

The Doctor turned around. First left. Ten meters. Third left. Right. Keep going and don't wake Gladys. The Doctor did not come across anyone who might be named Gladys, so he must have done that part right. He came to a T intersection; a round door on broken hinges tilted inward like a halfhearted invitation in front of him.

He hesitated outside the door. The Krik-Tar's words echoed in his ears: _Do you know what that is?_

 _Time Lord!_ The hatred attached to the name. The Krik-Tar he was looking for might be more chatty, but she wasn't likely to be more pro-Time Lord.

It was in these moments of hesitation where the Doctor would remind himself of his secret weapon: he had nothing to lose. What could she do? Kill him? He grinned at the thought and set his hand firmly on the door, giving it a shove.

The metal that made up the door sat crookedly in the frame, so when he pushed it open it dragged along the floor with a horrible scraping noise. The Doctor winced, but persisted, pushing until he could fit his torso through the frame.

A thick brown stinger embedded itself in the wall above the Doctor's head.

"Wait." Beyond the stinger and the strong, arched tail, the Doctor could make out the glinting black compound eyes of the female Krik-Tar. "Wait," he said again in her own tongue, "I'm here to talk."

The stinger wrenched itself from the wall, bits of rock and concrete crumbling onto the Doctor's shoulder, but he didn't look away. "I just want to talk. Please." When he said "please," he tapped the nail of his finger three times against the concrete wall behind him, simulating the portion of the Krik-Tarian language that needed to be tapped out with a spare leg.

The Krik-Tar's tail lowered. It was only a few centimeters, but it was something. Her weight shifted back, more balanced than forward now, more wary than murderous.

"You're the Time Lord," she said.

The name made the Doctor cringe internally. "I'm the Doctor," he said. "What's your name?"

"Tinik." She took several scuttling steps back into the room. "What do you want from us?"

"Your friend attacked me," the Doctor pointed out, but after another long moment he added, "and then you saved my life, Tinik. Thank you."

Her tail twitched. "What do you want?"

That question was completely off-topic as far as the Doctor was concerned. What he wanted was something. Just _something_ to hold on to. Maybe someone. And not at all anything to do with what was going on right now.

"Listen, you're not supposed to be on this planet," he said. "I can help you get back home. And how did you even get here?" He raised his arms, gesturing at the room and the planet Earth outside.

Tinik's tail twitched again. She braced her front legs in a way that the Doctor didn't think could mean anything good. "I won't leave without Kom." Her voice quavered as she said Kom's name.

"You're afraid of me," the Doctor said. The realization was like looking down to find that he'd been shot. This should hurt. This will hurt, but there was something oddly terrifying and cartoonishly funny about the whole situation. He'd been expecting revenge on behalf of her people, but as it turned out, she was expecting the same thing.

"But I will not move." The quaver had been banished from her voice. "You may have power to change my past, but I will not be moved. I will find my husband and we will find a way to return to our home safely."

"Oh," the Doctor said. That, at least, answered several of his questions. And finding that his goals aligned with someone he previously thought he might be at odds with was a surprisingly positive turn in his terrible day. "Okay."

"Don't mock me!"

The Doctor tried to back up, but bumped into the cold stone wall. "I'm not. I promise I'm not," he said. "You have to listen. I'm not-" His words faltered. He wasn't what? A Time Lord? He was. A soldier? He had been, didn't that make him one now? When did the fighting stop?

"I didn't-" he tried again, but it seemed useless. He didn't personally unravel her planet's history and stitch it back up as it pleased him, but some Time Lord had and he was all that was left of the Time Lords. He alone possessed their knowledge, their history, their heritage, and the responsibility for their actions.

"I'm sorry," he said, his own voice faltering. He needed to continue, to explain even if there wasn't an explanation that could ever cut deep enough, but the air had left the room and the world was spinning, spinning under his feet. His hands fumbled against the wall, seeking some crack in the cold concrete that he could hold onto.

Her tail moved. A blur of rotating motion that reminded the Doctor of someone trying to sweep a spider out of the way while also trying to maintain distance in case it decided to strike back. The tail impacted him on his side and flew across the room until he crashed into the wall to the right. Pain shot through his shoulder and his knees gave out. He sunk to the floor.

"Sorry?" she shrieked. " _Sorry?_ My people may have been at war from before our history began, but my blood remembers peace. We carry our history inside of us, Time Lord. Your people cannot take that from us. I remember what we had, so I know what we've lost."

Of course. "You have an endogenous history," the Doctor voiced his realization aloud. That was how they could remember Time Lords when Time Lords technically never existed in this universe. They instinctively knew their history. Or histories, as the time lines shifted around them. It was a rare gift; one the Time Lords and a select few other species possessed.

Her tail raised again, ready to strike at him.

"Please," he said. "My people are gone. I'm all that's left." Saying it out loud hurt almost more than he could bear. He hadn't been able to speak the name "Time Lord" out loud since the end of the war. "I couldn't help during the war, but I'm trying to help now."

Another flick of brown motion. The Doctor flinched, but didn't have anywhere to go. The tail sailed over his head and the hard stinger at the tip of the tail cracked against the wall. The Doctor's hearts beat loudly in his ears. Stones pressed into his palms painfully, but he didn't dare move. He didn't have an excuse or an explanation to offer and no apology would come close. As far as he could tell, the only thing he _could_ offer was dying for the crimes of his people. But that revenge would be short and probably unsatisfying.

"I'm sorry," he said again. Eyes stinging, he waited a few breaths and when he was still alive at the end of them he looked cautiously up at Tinik.

She was studying him carefully, clearly unsure what to make of his lack of fight. She would have been expecting to have to defend herself, but so far, she had made all the offensive moves. Time Lord trickery? Her people had experienced worse Time Lord tricks.

"How did they manage it?" the Doctor wondered out loud, a detached part of him admiring the graceful curve of her tail above him. "If you have an endogenous history. It's very difficult to alter time when people are aware of it."

"Most aren't," Tinik replied, two of her feet scraping against the floor to add numerical emphasis. When she said _most_ , she meant _all but a few_. "I am High Priestess of the Deep Caverns of Vabr, and my order is small. We alone carry the histories."

"I see," the Doctor nodded. "And you told Kom, and he's here to...right."

Tinik's stinger pulled from the wall, sending more dust and rocks raining onto the Doctor's jacket. She backed away. "I remember a history when our children weren't afraid of Kom, but there has never been one where I couldn't trust him. He believes in protecting us, even now when he has lost nearly everything. And so it is my job now to protect him. Also," her tail twitched in something that might be humor, "I'm the only one who remembers anything."

A smile stretched at the Doctor's mouth briefly. He shifted to get his feet under him again and slowly climbed to his feet. "So what does any of this have to do with Earth?"

Tinik tapped her front legs thoughtfully. "Is that the name of this place?"

The Doctor nodded. "Or Terra, if you prefer."

She tapped her legs again. "The Time Lords stopped polluting the timeline some years ago. We have been working slowly to build peace again...but it's- Peace is difficult to build when no one remembers it. We told our true history to the people, but their violent natures turned to anger at the ones who took those memories. The Krik-Tar united to destroy the Time Lords, which was not our original intention...but at least we're no longer killing each other." She took a few skittering steps to one side, looking cautiously at the Doctor. "Was it your people who left the portals on our world?"

Portals? A Time Lord could have, arguably, opened a portal. The Doctor's mouth was dry. "When?" He swallowed and added, "When did the portals appear?"

He could see her considering what the information could possibly mean to him if he were an enemy.

"If it was in the past year," he said, "it wasn't...Time Lords. They couldn't."

Tinik's tail twitched. The Doctor closed his eyes again, bracing himself. When nothing happened, he slowly opened them again and saw Tinik lowered onto the ground. It was an alien equivalent to crouching in front of a child to bring yourself to their height. "You said they were gone," she said, surprisingly gently.

The Doctor had said this himself, but hearing it spoken back to him hurt like she'd struck him. He pressed his teeth together until they hurt.

"They're gone," he confirmed, his voice cracking. "We lost the war. We lost everything."

Tinik curled her back legs under herself, settling down onto the floor. "You have the same pain," she said, amazed.

Silence settled around them making the ragged sound of the Doctor's breathing suddenly loud in his ears. Grappling with the knowledge that Tinik no longer seemed intent of killing him, the Doctor felt as though he needed to climb back into his skin after he had been ready to shed it. The process was sharp and somehow ill-fitting. So he did what he always did when he didn't want to think on his own problems: he set to work solving someone else's.

"I can get you home," he said. "You don't have to lose everything."

Her tail twitched, amused now instead of threatening. "You are not as terrifying a monster as I had thought," she said.

The Doctor didn't correct her.

* * *

Angel stopped under a tree and slumped onto the small stone wall that ran along the path, his leg already aching deeply from the short walk from the pub. Atalia Bridge was only a few meters away now. He sniffed the air, confirming what he already knew, that the Doctor had come this way. The Doctor's gunpowder scent was faint over the crisp smells of autumn, but unmistakable. There was something distinct and alien about it mixed with a familiar tinge of fear.

He wanted to go home. At home, he had more weapons than the small knife he kept in his boot and the wooden stake in his jacket pocket. At home he also had a quarterstaff that would make a passable walking stick, and some ready-made charms and hexes which could help in a fight with a bigger, stronger, and less maimed opponent. But by going home, he would lose time, which may or may not be of the essence. It would all depend on how quickly the Doctor found trouble.

Given his past experiences with the Doctor, he was likely already in trouble. Trouble was the Doctor's natural habitat as far as Angel could tell. When he wasn't already in it, he was actively seeking it out.

Angel let out a sigh and looked out across Atalia Bridge and that was when he saw it: a dark shadow scuttling on the underside of the bridge like an enormous cockroach.

Angel hated when he was right (at least about things like this). He pushed himself up from the stone wall, a sharp pain shooting up his leg. He balanced on his good leg and looked around quickly. A moment later, in a particularly graceful move (if he did say so himself), he leapt up into the air and grabbed a branch of the tree he had been sitting under. With a snarl, he snapped off a thick offshoot and landed back on his good leg, only wobbling slightly. With a sharp movement, he snapped off the twiggy end of the branch and then discarded it over the stone wall.

A quick glance across the bridge showed the dark shape scuttling into the even darker drain pipe. Angel cursed and felt in his pockets for something that would give him an upper hand. There were the painkillers the Doctor had given him, some lint, his Palm, and a few odd coins.

"Ah," he said, and fished the coins out. He dropped them in the dirt in front of him and quickly scratched a few magic symbols in the dirt around them with his new walking stick. Racking his brain for the exact combination of words for his spell, he shot a glance at the drain pipe, now ominously empty. Refocusing on the magic at hand, he whispered the spell in Gaelic. Irish magic tended to flow quickly and practically, a lingering influence from its sources in fairy magic. It could also be fickle if not minded properly for the same reasons.

After a short chant, he felt the warm fizz of magic and an extra strong wind whipped about him. Leaning heavily on his stick, Angel bent and retrieved the coins, which should now carry a Disorientation Hex. He carefully tucked them into his pocket and then set off across Atalia Bridge at a fast limp.

He followed the Doctor's scent into the drain pipe and through the tunnels, cursing under his breath when he noted that the earthy scent of the Krik-Tar followed a similar path. He knew the sewers and pipes fairly well, since he sometimes needed to visit the residents, and his feet knew when to take an extra big step over a crumbling hole or broken grate.

Deep into the maze, past Gladys's den, was a doorway that opened up into an old, dry reservoir. As he approached, Angel could hear a loud crack and clatter of breaking concrete and stone. And also the Doctor's insulted, " _Hey!_ "; like being attacked was a small offense perpetrated by a naughty child.

"Stay the _hell_ back!" a low voice shouted. There was a tinny quality to it, like it was being run through a machine.

"Okay, okay," the Doctor's voice said, "Let's all just-"

Angel hobbled faster. The door was almost in reach now.

A chittering sound mixed with the Doctor's voice, maybe someone talking over him in another language? Could the Krik-Tar _talk_?

"No," the low, tinny voice growled, "these creatures are evil. I have to stop it before it destroys this world, too."

"I'm not trying to-" the Doctor's voice cut off with the thick _thump_ of something heavy hitting flesh. The Doctor yelped in pain.

Leaning heavily on his walking stick, Angel kicked open the door with his good foot. It shrieked open an additional few feet, the metal grating against the stone. He regretted it instantly: his bad leg did not appreciate being used as a support and threatened to give out underneath him. He stumbled back onto his good foot and tried to compose himself back into something of a threatening posture. "Ow," he growled in his most threatening voice.

Two giant scorpion creatures, one of them the large metal-clad green one from earlier and the other only slightly smaller and a muted brown, stared at him. That might have been surprise, but their insect-like faces made it difficult to tell. The Doctor was slowly picking himself up from the floor from the back right corner of the room, an arm wrapped protectively around his torso and he winced as he pushed himself up the wall.

"Leave him," the Doctor coughed. "He's a civilian."

The brown Krik-Tar chattered at Angel.

"More like a civilian that you've manipulated into doing your dirty work. Tinik explained how your kind operate," the green Krik-Tar growled. He lowered himself into a crouch, his claws raised, one snapping threateningly at the Doctor and the other at Angel. "Don't listen to this creature's lies," he growled at Angel.

"I've been doing my best to not listen to anything he says," Angel replied. He lacked the patience to deal with a confused, now _talking_ alien/monster/demon. God, this day had started so simply with a mindless, violent monster, and the Doctor had managed to ruin it by turning demons into aliens and violent monsters into wounded soldiers who actually had a _very_ good reason for attacking Time Lords if they really had changed their entire history...

"But you can't skewer him because..." Actually, Angel wasn't entirely sure why. The Doctor wasn't exactly a friend (although a future version of the Doctor had said that they were). And Angel was still committed to his not-getting-involved-with-people principles. But he wasn't just going to leave the Doctor there, either. He had _some_ decency left under all the selfishness. "You just can't," he finished lamely.

"Then you're one of them."

The claw snapped forward at Angel and he stumbled out of the way, his hand digging into his pocket. "Doctor, run."

The Doctor ducked under one of the snapping claws. "Love to," he said, backing away again before the Krik-Tar could take off his head. His back hit the wall and his eyes were wide as the Krik-Tar pulled his claw back for another snap.

Angel's hand closed on a coin and he pulled it out of his pocket and threw it into the middle of the room.

He had to give it to the soldier: he had a good head. He saw the coin flip through the air and must have assumed that it was a weapon. He pulled back, shielding the brown Krik-Tar with his body as the coin hit the ground.

It hit with a weight unlike a coin, sticking where it landed instead of bouncing and rolling. A warm glow emanated from it and then a bright flash of light burst out.

Everyone in the room swayed, looking frantically around like a bomb had gone off and they had completely lost their bearings.

The green Krik-Tar turned frantically toward the brown one behind him, his tail brushing along the side of her face in a way that looked oddly tender. In the corner, the Doctor had gone stiff, one arm still wrapped protectively around his torso and the other pressed against the side of his head.

"Doctor," Angel hissed, limping forward, "run."

The Doctor blinked at him. "What did you-?" His gaze unfocused and slid off of Angel. "I was- I can't think." He stumbled to the side, his shoulder hitting the wall.

Angel shot a glance over his shoulder. The spell disoriented, but it didn't change anything's nature. If the Krik-Tar managed to sort out that they were still its enemy, it could still decapitate them just as well, if remain slightly confused about why. "It's a spell, Doctor, now run."

"Run. Right." The Doctor stumbled forward and paused by Angel, looking over at the aliens. "What about them? We should tell them...if there's..." he squinted and shook his head.

Angel grabbed back of the Doctor's collar and shoved him out the door. "They know, Doctor, I'm sure that they'll be right behind us."

"We have to stop it," the green Krik-Tar growled angrily. It stumbled sideways and crashed heavily into the wall.

Angel pushed the Doctor again and he swayed out into the hallway, putting out a hand to catch himself against the far wall of the tunnel. "I don't feel very good."

"Yeah, imagine how you'll feel when that giant scorpion snaps you in half." Angel grabbed the Doctor by the front this time, dragging him by a fistful of jumper as he limped down the hall with the support of his walking stick.

"We were talking," the Doctor protested, pulling futilely against Angel's strength, "I need to know about the portals."

The metal door screeched as it was ripped off of the hinges behind them. "I'll stop you," the green Krik-Tar growled. Angel shot a look over his shoulder and saw its great bulk lumbering into the hallway. The Krik-Tar looked in both directions and seemed to be having a difficult time sorting out what he was trying to do and which direction he should go.

He met Angel's eyes and seemed to reach a sharp conclusion. He scuttled toward them in fast pursuit of Angel and the Doctor.

"Dammit," Angel grumbled under his breath.

The Doctor twisted in Angel's grip, the fabric of his jumper pulling in Angel's fist. "I think he's trying to kill us," the Doctor said.

"Yeah, which is why we're running away."

"I knew that," the Doctor said haughtily.

Angel rolled his eyes, but the Doctor was moving more quickly now, so he didn't confuse the issue further by arguing.

"I'll...stop...you," the Krik-Tar growled, his feet clicking along the metal of the tunnel and steadily increasing in speed.

Angel tried to limp faster, the Doctor now dragging him as he found a pace at a quick jog. Until the Doctor came to an abrupt halt at a path that crossed the tunnel.

"What do you think is down _there_?" the Doctor asked, the idea of imminent danger apparently sliding from his befuddled mind like butter from a hot pan.

"Let's find out," Angel said, quickly, shoving the Doctor down the dark tunnel. He'd just managed to push himself in after the Doctor when the Krik-Tar barreled by with all the weight and speed of a freight train. Angel could hear him shriek in the slow realization that his prey had dodged out of the way.

"Not as great as I was expecting," the Doctor said, squinting at the walls. He turned his squinted eyes slowly around to Angel. "You look frightened."

"Well, in my defense, we're probably going to die." Angel grabbed the Doctor again and gave him a shove to continue putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the very angry and confused scorpion. And then he realized what tunnel they'd jumped down. "Dammit," he said again. "This is Gladys's tunnel. We have to go back."

By the scrambling and clattering noises, the Krik-Tar was already trying to turn itself around in the narrow tunnel. They were losing the little lead they had. There was no way Angel could out-limp the alien, and its more simple set of goals was allowing it to function much better under the disorientation spell than the already-distractible Doctor.

They backed up into the main tunnel again, and Angel could see the Krik-Tar halfway through turning himself around, his front legs scrambling up the sides of the walls to fit his long body.

"Angel," the Doctor said, his eyes wide and staring. "I'm not sure you can outrun a Krik-Tar with a limp."

"You _think?_ " Angel growled. "I'm going to have to fight the bastard."

"That doesn't seem-" the Doctor trailed off, his eyes drifted back to the side tunnel, probably wondering what was down there again. "Hey, Angel!" he exclaimed.

"Yeah, it's not as great as you think," Angel said dismissively, hoping the Doctor wouldn't indulge his curiosity for the second time to go explore the tunnel they had just exited. He let go of the Doctor and settled his balance on his one good foot. He eyed the Krik-Tar as he slid with a loud _clang_ to the floor facing Angel and the Doctor.

Angel lowered his stance. If he could get behind the Krik-Tar, it would have a difficult time turning around again in the tunnel. He might just be able to get in a few shots before it could defend itself.

Of course, there wasn't a lot of room left in the tunnel for Angel to squeeze past the alien. He'd likely get caught in its pincers when he made the attempt.

"I think I have an idea," the Doctor said.

"Run back the way we came?" Angel asked, starting to like the idea despite his issues with actually running.

"No, that wasn't it," the Doctor said. He patted his pockets with his hands.

"Run, Doctor," Angel growled.

"I was...oh!"

Angel heard the click of metal. And then a high pitched squealing buzz of the sonic screwdriver.

The Krik-Tar started to charge toward them.

Angel took several steps back, wincing at the sound that seemed to be drilling its way into his head. "Stop that, Doctor!"

"I think it's important," the Doctor said. Angel turned to give him a look, but the just Doctor grinned toothily back at him. "I can't remember."

Angel turned his attention back to the Krik-Tar. It was closer than he had expected. He braced himself for an impact, his walking stick held up as a makeshift club.

Just before the Krik-Tar reached him, he heard the growl down the tunnel to his left. A scorpion-like claw shot forward and Angel dodged out of its way when a huge, black maw clamped down on it. A giant hellhound braced her paws on either side of the offshooting tunnel and gave the Krik-Tar a vicious shake.

Angel ducked and backed away to avoid getting hit in the head. He stumbled into the Doctor.

"Oh," the Doctor said. And then he giggled. It sounded very odd coming out of his mouth. "She's a _bitch_."


	4. Chapter 4

The Doctor's head pounded. The events in the tunnel dripped unevenly in his mind, beading and rolling away like mercury, only to drip back again. A large black dog. Angel telling him to run. A brief moment as they ran past Tinik, their eyes had met, both of them confused, but the Doctor was sure they had more to say to each other. Slipping out through a pipe that barely fit his shoulders and splashing into the cold ocean. Angel dragging him, sputtering and shocked by the cold, out of the water.

Now he found himself back in the pub that Angel insisted on going to (maybe the reason why this pub was better than other pubs had been lost in the magic-induced fog), dribbling miserably onto a large red tablecloth that had been laid down for that purpose.

A man, (the name "Marty" dripped painfully back into the Doctor's mind) set a large cup of coffee in front of him. The Doctor tried to smile in gratitude, but it came out as a wince and a grunt.

"Thanks," Angel said, nodding to Marty.

"Let me know if you need anything else," Marty said and moved off to the other end of the bar. He was flipping the chairs up onto the tables, which were all empty now in the early hours of the morning.

"That was uniquely horrible," the Doctor said. He took a sip of the scalding hot coffee, winced again, and swallowed.

"Sorry," Angel winced also. "It's an equal-opportunity Disorientation Hex."

Another memory impacted somewhere in the back of the Doctor's head with a violent throb of pain. "Do you think Gladys killed him?" he asked. If that were the case, he might never be able to get Tinik home. Not willingly, anyway.

"I don't know," Angel shook his head. "She's pretty vicious but then...armored scorpion soldier."

"Right. That. Let's assume the worst case scenario." He sipped at his coffee, trying to run through the possible timelines resulting from different victors of that fight. It hurt. And he still couldn't sort out which one would be worst case scenario.

"Uh…" Angel drummed his fingers on the table. It was deeply irritating. "What would that be, exactly? They're both kind of...menaces."

"He's a misplaced soldier," the Doctor said. His head throbbed. "Okay, yes, a menace. But I was talking with Tinik, and she wants to go home." Salt water trickled down his face and dripped from his chin into his coffee. "We might be able to reach an agreement. If we can stop trying to kill each other."

Angel let out a soft sigh. "An agreement. Like, if you asked nicely enough she might just take the soldier by the hand and skip merrily home?"

"I doubt they can skip," the Doctor said, glaring down at his mug. "But she has a world to rebuild, and he, well-" the Doctor wasn't sure what to add in defense of the other Krik-Tar. What was left for a soldier to do after the war had ended? He shivered.

After a moment Angel sighed softly again. "Alright. We try to talk to...Tinik? And find the portal that sends them home."

The Doctor looked up at Angel. "Assuming there is a portal to send them home," he said. "There's something off about those portals. It's the wrong technology." The way Tinik had (somewhat crudely) described the portal, it practically confirmed his suspicions of the involvement of Dalek technology. The idea of it made his heartrates jump. If some of their technology survived, what if they had survived as well? "But you're right that we should find out if anything remains of the portal. Just to be safe." And to confirm his suspicions.

"Couldn't be magic, could it?" Angel asked with a bit of dryness, like he knew he couldn't hope for it to be that simple.

"We'll have to go look at it," the Doctor said.

Angel nodded, resigned. "I'm kind of tapped out on sources right now," he admitted. "Unless Marty knows something."

"Tinik said she came out on a beach. She described what I suspect was a golf course: a large green area with flags sticking up. We can start there."

"Okay," Angel agreed. He played with the glass of scotch that Marty had brought him unasked, looking at it like he might have actually had enough. It made deep sliding sounds on the wood that wasn't as irritating as the drumming of fingers. "So Doctor...the Krik-Tar seems awfully focused on you in particular. And I know vengeance when I see it." He paused, looking up from his glass carefully. "What'd you do?"

The Doctor forced himself to meet Angel's gaze, squeezing the hot mug in his hand. "I've never been to their home world," he wanted it to sound angry or firm or true, but instead it sounded guilty and pleading. "I never touched them," he added.

Angel raised an eyebrow. Simple; disbelieving; patient.

The Doctor sniffed and tried to gather his thoughts. Cold water ran unpleasantly down his back. "It's a simple mistake for a small mind," he said. "Someone that is the same type of alien as me must have done something to them and they can't be bothered to differentiate." He lifted his chin proudly, pleased with having made a slightly better display.

Angel regarded him with the same even expression. "Then what did the Time Lords do?"

All of the breath went out of the Doctor's lungs. "Where did you hear that name?" he asked, low and dangerous.

"You," Angel replied calmly.

"I think I'd remember."

"You will when it happens."

"Then you already know," the Doctor said. He couldn't imagine it. He couldn't imagine telling anyone about his past (or his present). He certainly couldn't imagine that person being this creature in front of him.

"What your people did to the Krik-Tar?" Angel asked. "Or what your people were planning to do to the universe? I don't have all the pieces," he admitted. "But the ones I do have don't fit."

The Doctor's eyes burned. He buried his face in his mug of coffee, savoring the scalding sensation as it slipped down his throat and the bitter acid taste. He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to think about it, but here it was anyway: the war, blinding and burning him like a sun and casting a long, dark shadow behind him. "I don't know exactly," he said. "I wasn't everywhere, but from what Tinik said, their planet was de-industrialized."

Angel didn't respond right away, but the sound of his glass sliding on the wood table started again. "I've got sources that say that the Time Lords changed the Krik-Tar," he said softly.

That was the truth of it; he felt the shame of trying to hide the crime behind a nice, sterile word. "Yes," he said. The Doctor took a deep breath. "Say there's a planet, like the Krik-Tar's world, with valuable resources for the enemy, but not strategically worth protecting." He forced himself to look at Angel. If he was to confess for his people, then he should do it right. "You can make that planet less valuable to them by making it so that the native civilization never develops the ability to mine those resources. The infrastructure is never built and would be prohibitively expensive to build by an alien force." The Doctor watched Angel, but decided not to wait through another silence. "Time Lords would send a small team early in the civilization's development and make sure that it broke down. Usually into warring factions. Although there were other ways. They make it so they never reach an industrial stage: De-industrialization."

"Damn," Angel whispered. He finally took a sip of his drink.

"I wouldn't blame them if they killed me," the Doctor said, turning his mug in his hands.

"Me neither," Angel agreed. "So I guess maybe we should bring along some extra backup before confronting them. Guns or something."

"Would there be a benefit to that?"

Angel gave a half shrug. "I mean, I guess you'll regenerate if they kill you. But it seems like a hassle for both of us. Question, though: how do the Krik-Tar remember all this? If the Time Lords changed their past, how do they know about a future that never was?"

"They have leaders," the Doctor paused, reconsidering the term. "Priestesses, like Tinik, who can remember multiple timelines. It would have been important to keep them out of the way when the planet's history was rewritten. I assume since..." the Doctor stopped abruptly, the words sticking in his throat.

He changed course, saying stiffly, "apparently, they regained some power over the people and told them about what happened. Soldiers included." He twisted his mug in his hands.

Angel nodded seriously. Then he suddenly straightened up, like he might get off his stool. "Alright. So we'll go scout out golf courses by the beach for alien teleportation technology." He sighed. "I'm getting really bad at this whole not-getting-involved thing."

The Doctor looked up at Angel, a half-mad smile flashing across his face. "Very," he said. He sipped his coffee, now slightly less than painful to drink. "Why did you come after me?"

Angel lifted his eyes upward. "Well, my Ancient Greek sucks, but I gathered from my source that the Krik-Tar might be on a search-and-destroy mission after you. And…" he swallowed, his eyes lowering again. "I think maybe at some point...we'll be friends."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

Angel looked back up and shrugged again.

"I just explained how some of the worst possible war crimes are committed and you introduced yourself by saying, 'I'm 100% evil,'" the Doctor said.

"So at least that means we have something in common, right? I hear that's the kind of thing friendships are built on."

The Doctor snorted. It was half derisive, but the other half of him was honestly amused. Angel possessed a bluntness and a bent toward sarcasm that his friends didn't normally have. Then again, he wasn't sure if this version of himself was inclined toward any sort of friends.

"Yeah," Angel agreed, a wry smile playing with his lips. "I don't know, either."

* * *

Angel never really understood golf courses. He never really understood golf . Hockey, yes. American football, yes. Rugby, yes. All the violent sports. But golf?

"It's just…" he gestured helplessly with his right hand, the other one gripping his walking stick (the first had gotten lost somewhere around jumping into the ocean, so this was a new one taken from one of the trees at the edge of the course). "They spend all this time and money making this landscape that's as boring as a child's coloring book, just to stand around and calculate and look and calculate some more and line up and think again and adjust and then , finally, whack the damn little ball and hope they land it in a tiny little hole on the other side of the coloring book."

The Doctor snorted.

"And people watch this."

They'd been strolling around the green for nearly twenty minutes now, with no sign of the portal. Angel had been hoping that it would be obvious: a bright, shiny thing glowing in the night, but a cursory walk from one end to the other revealed nothing. They were heading toward the spectator stands, now, which was what had started Angel on his rant. That, and his leg hurt from all the traipsing around.

The Doctor had been waving the sonic screwdriver when they'd started, but it had long since been tucked away into his pocket. His pace never slowed, though, and he continued to stride across the monochrome expanse of green purposefully. It was a quicker pace that Angel actually found that he enjoyed, even when slowed by having to use his walking stick. It felt like even if they weren't exactly finding anything, they were at leastgoing somewhere.

"Well, they're not watching it for entertainment," the Doctor said, "I imagine it's another form of tranquilizer. Easy access. Don't have to run all the way down to the chemists."

"When I want to relax I get a glass of scotch and find a good book," Angel replied, shoving his free hand into his pocket. "I don't bore myself into tranquility."

"Congratulations," the Doctor said. "Would you like a prize?"

Angel glared sideways at the Doctor, the instinctual urge to punch him curling his fist in his pocket. That seemed extreme, though. Instead, he grunted and said, "Any idea what we're looking for, if not a shimmery, glowy rip in space?"

"If it is what I think it is, there'll be a warm spot. And probably a metal smell. Not an earth metal, but a bit like lead." The Doctor came to an abrupt halt and squinted off in another direction. "Let's go this way," he said, heading off with the same purposeful stride.

Angel followed, now tuning his senses into non-earthly metallic smells, dismissing the sweet, freshly cut grass smell that hung in the air and the Doctor's own alien scent, now tinged with an oddly human hint of fear.

He wondered what that fear connected to. Had the Doctor already destroyed his home planet? Was he planning to now?

"Can I ask you something?" Angel said after several paces.

The Doctor continued to stare forward, not even so much as turning his head to physically acknowledge Angel. "Sure," he said.

"How long has it been since the Time War for you?" Hopefully, the question would be broad enough to get the answer he needed without having to bring himself to ask, "hey, did you blow up your home yet?" Even for Angel, that seemed cruel.

The Doctor stared blankly forward. "For Tinik and Kom," the Doctor said, "it hasn't ended."

"I didn't ask about Tinik and Kom," Angel said. "I asked about you."

The Doctor lifted his chin, practically stomping forward. "The fires are still burning," he said. "I can hardly call that 'ended' either."

How...unhelpful. Angel paused to adjust his grip on his walking stick before speeding up to keep pace with the Doctor.

The Doctor's answer didn't support him having done it yet, but it didn't exclude the possibility that he had, either. In some sense, the fires would always be eternal for him. He would have to live in his own hell all his future lives (and presumably after his death), and yet Angel had seen him cheerful and optimistic and kind regardless.

What sort of man was this?

"Right," Angel said softly. "Sorry."

They walked on. Angel mused in silence, but after a few moments the Doctor said, "That girl, Rose Tyler." He made a noise, like clearing his throat. "She was something different. Or something familiar. Like..." he stopped speaking and considered the line of trees that they were approaching. "Maybe I just had ashes in my eyes from blowing up her building," he said quickly. "But right now, I'd take ashes over flames."

Angel nodded in understanding. Flames to ashes was the easier part. The falling away in exhaustion to an easier state of being. It was the ashes back to sparks of life part that Angel tended to have a difficult time with. It was just so easy and comforting to remain softly, numbly buried. He took a deep breath and let it out again.

"Small steps," he said. "At least you're moving forward."

"That's me," the Doctor said, unenthusiastically. He looked over at Angel. "You were grieving at the monastery," he said, suddenly intent. "How's that going?"

"Oh, she got better," Angel said. "Her friends brought her back to life again. Then she died again, of course, but I was a little more prepared that time. And it was 150 years ago now, so…" He would always miss Buffy, of course. But time had passed and he was okay.

But the mention of the monastery made Angel think. He'd asked the Doctor why he'd been there at the time, and Angel was pretty sure the Doctor hadn't answered, except he'd said something about learning to let go of his attachments. If he'd said more, Angel had been too wrapped up in his own attachments to listen. Angel wondered how much of an asshole that made him.

"Plenty of baby steps in between," the Doctor concluded. "That's...well, that certainly is. "

"Yeah," Angel agreed, mentally shaking himself out of his thoughts. "It is." He wasn't sure what, exactly, is was, but it certainly was something.

They came to the neat line of trees and the Doctor looked up at the branches, and then left and right. "Ah!" he said, walking away to the right. Again, Angel followed, trying not to indulge in the hope that the Doctor had actually found something and not that he was trying to distract from an uncomfortable topic.

Because either way, Angel was glad for the distraction.

A few steps later, the Doctor pointed. "Look!" He turned and grinned his wide, toothy smile at Angel.

Angel looked and saw that a thick branch on one of the trees had been snapped. It hung limply, just barely clinging to the tree and swaying slightly in the ocean breeze. It had clearly been broken recently, as the leaves were all had the same beginnings of yellow that the rest of the tree was showing. Moreover, it hadn't been cleared away, which would likely be done sooner rather than later on the highly manicured field.

"Krik-Tar?" Angel said.

"Yup! We have a trail. How's your nose at these things?"

"I've been compared to bloodhounds before," Angel replied. Ungraciously , he thought.

"Brilliant!" the Doctor said. He stepped aside and waved a hand for Angel to pass.

So Angel went first, sniffing for the same sour, slightly bitter scent of the Krik-Tars that he'd unavoidably gotten to know by painfully close proximity. He picked it up on the southern side of the broken branch and, following it down toward the water, eventually picked up an ozone scent, as well.

"There," he nodded. It was dark under the thin trees and the thing wasn't glowing, but Angel could still see the metal, alien device clearly about a dozen meters ahead on the ground. It was about the size of a frisbee, but thicker and oval. The center of it was made from a smooth, matte grey metal interrupted along the edges by regularly placed golden half-spheres, like balls had been sunken into its side.

The Doctor nodded to Angel and they silently walked the remaining distance to reach the device. The Doctor crouched in front of it and his fingers reached out like he wanted to touch it, but then pulled back slightly. There was a jerking quality to the gesture, like he had been stung. Standing up again, the Doctor looked down at the device with his shoulders squared and his feet firmly planted. Angel thought it was an oddly aggressive posture to take with an alien frisbee, but then, he didn't know much about alien frisbees.

The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his coat pocket and buzzed it at the device. He observed the tip of the screwdriver, frowned, circled the device and gave it another buzz before tucking the screwdriver back into his pocket.

"Let me guess," Angel finally said. "It's alien tech. It's metal. It looks like a weird-ass frisbee."

"Yup," the Doctor agreed. He stood on one foot and slowly lifted his other foot toward the device. "And I don't think it will disitigrate me on contact."

"Oh, good," Angel said, genuinely pleased that that was established. "So is it Krik-Tar tech?"

"Nope." The Doctor slowly lowered his toe onto the device. When nothing happened, he nudged it so it tipped slightly in the dirt. "As I said, they don't have the technology. Someone must have given this to them. Or, come to the planet with it and left it behind."

"Any idea which someone?"

The Doctor, seemingly satisfied that the device was not going to kill him on contact, bent and plucked it from the ground. "Yeah. Aliens," he said. "I wouldn't worry about it." He shoved the device into his jacket pocket quickly, like holding it burned him.

Angel felt like he might just be starting to get the hang of telling when the Doctor wasn't telling him something. The I wouldn't worry about it part in particular. The Doctor said it the same way Angel told William not to worry about it whenever he asked a question Angel didn't feel like answering.

"Old friends of yours?" Angel asked.

The Doctor actually shivered. "No," he practically growled.

"Old enemy, then," Angel nodded. "Who are they?"

"You haven't heard of them," the Doctor said. He stepped over a fallen branch.

Part of Angel wondered if it was even worth the effort to push it, but given that it had direct importance to what was going on in Angel's town, he thought he should. "That's not what I asked. These people's technology sent a couple of giant, violent scorpions to my city and one of them threw me off a walkway and broke my leg. I'm going to be sore from the crash landing for a week. And I'm pretty sure I'm on Judith Cole's Never Letting My Kid Near Him Again list permanently now." Which was a good thing? It should be a good thing. So why had he listed it with the bad things? Angel mentally shook himself again. "This is relevant."

The Doctor paused, still facing away from Angel. "They're monsters," he said. Turning to look back at Angel he added, "and not the kitten-buying, kid-saving kind."

Angel gave the Doctor the finger.

"They kill," the Doctor said, "and steal and destroy. That's who they are, Angel."

"And who are they?" Angel asked again.

"They were called Daleks," the Doctor said. "They're dead now. This is just a remnant."

Angel nodded, feeling like he should win some sort of prize for wresting the answer out of the Doctor. Again, familiarity and bits of a long-ago conversation tugged at Angel and he put the pieces together. "They were who you fought in the Time War."

The Doctor clenched his jaw and released it. "Future me must not have told you much," he concluded.

"But they were," Angel pressed.

"Yes."

Angel nodded again, swallowing. "So how'd this tech get here, do you think?" The Doctor had said that the Daleks were dead: that implied that Gallifrey was gone, too. Gone in a permanent sense. So shouldn't the Daleks be gone, too?

The Doctor started to walk away, out of the line of trees and out onto the flat green of the golf course. Angel limped after him, assuming that the silence was the only answer he was going to get, but once he caught up the Doctor spoke.

"Like I said, the planet has resources that they would have wanted. With the society militarized, I imagine their plan was to encourage the natural pushback against the Time Lord interference of the population. With at least some individuals able to remember their other histories, there had to be some pushback. And the Daleks would be happy to supply the name Time Lords and a teleportation device. It might even be able to pick up on the presence of a TARDIS, which is why our friends landed on Earth."

Which would have been very useful information the first time Angel asked. Instead, Angel had gotten a Don't worry about it . Damn Time Lord.

Although, Angel supposed he should give the Doctor some compassionate leeway, given the trauma and grief.

"Alright," Angel nodded. "Thanks for telling me."

The Doctor let out a derisive snort and walked on.

Maybe it was because Angel was ornery himself, or maybe it was because he'd just eaten several painkillers, but he thought he saw a hint of thanks for caring in the slightly relaxed tension in the Doctor's shoulders.

* * *

Kom woke first. His memories blurred and spiraled, but his training held him steady. He had to keep the mission in focus: Kill the Time Lord.

It wasn't an easy mission. Some had declared it suicidal, but Kom had volunteered. He loved his tribe and his home and if killing the Time Lords would keep that safe, then he would die trying. It had been an honor to step through the gate into the hell world with its chaos sky and its strange, swaying inhabitants.

Tinik, however...he had hoped that she would be able to escape the fighting now that the Great Wars were over. Her fractured knowledge of the pasts (both real and possible) made it difficult to fit with the world that they lived in. She knew peace in a way that Kom never could.

She woke slowly next to him, her tail curling and uncurling. "Where are we?" she asked. "Kom, the Time Lord...did he summon a monster or...?"

"He must have. I took care of it." It had been a long, difficult fight. The shadowy creature with four legs and sharp teeth had been surprisingly strong and resilient, biting down on one of Kom's front legs even as his claws snapped down on its neck. The front plates of his armour had been damaged by the raking claws of the monster and they jutted painfully into his exoskeleton.

"I thought that he-" Tinik shook her head, like she wanted to shake off the last of the confusion.

Kom's tail twitched.

"He said that he wasn't going to hurt us," Tinik finished.

"Yes, well, Time Lords are liars," Kom said. It was in their nature. Some creatures were just evil and there wasn't anything to do but fight them, body and mind.

Tinik slowly climbed to her feet, she was also still wobbly from the aftereffects of whatever had been thrown at them. "But he seemed concerned. He said he could take us home. He said that the Time Lords were dead."

That was an odd lie. "Dead?" Kom scoffed. "He clearly isn't."

"Except for him. He says he's the last."

"He's lying," Kom said again. "The Time Lords are evil, but highly intelligent. If they can alter other species they would not be so easily fooled into their own destruction."

Tinik wandered on unsteady legs toward the bent metal door that used to cover the entrance to the room. "He didn't try to attack me," she said, although she sounded uncertain. "Or if that was an attack, he was very bad at it." Tinik looked up at Kom with her lovely fractal eyes that he had adored from the day they met. "I don't know, Kom. I'm so tired."

Kom melted a little bit. He scuttled over to her slowly, picking his way over debris on unsteady legs. The bent armor dug into him uncomfortably. He reached out with a claw and lovingly scraped off some of her shedding exoskeleton. "I will finish this. Once the Time Lord is gone my mission will be over and we can work out a way home. Or find a way to live here."

Tinik clicked two of her feet against the ground - the Krik-Tar gesture for no , but she always did it with a bit of annoyance. "This plan will do nothing but get you and our people killed. I made it through the portal and I won't leave you to fight alone."

Inside, Kom bristled with pride. Outside, though, he sighed irritably. "Are you going to help me kill the Time Lord, then?"

Tinik shifted nervously. Her eyes darted out the entrance, where a giant beast lay dead and bleeding in the tunnels. "What if- Pretend you believe it for a minute, Kom- What if the Time Lord is telling the truth? What if he wants to help us?"

Then Kom would very much like to speak with one of his superiors. But this was a part of the job: making difficult decisions. "Then it might also be true that he's the last of his kind," he said. "We could finish the mission. We could make sure the Time Lords can never do what they did to us to other innocents."

Tinik considered this for a moment. "It would be genocide," she said softly.

"It's our mission," Kom insisted. Or it was his mission. But more than that, it was what he could do to help his people. Possibly the last thing, with the end of fighting so close. After this, he would pass on the responsibility to people like Tinik, people with a different vision and training. "We didn't start this fight," he pointed out. "We didn't even have an advantage."

"So we take the advantage as soon as it's within snapping distance?" Tinik asked him. "Is that who we are?"

"It's who they made us to be," Kom replied darkly. "Once they are gone, we can change all of that. We can make our people better." He paused and then asked again, a note of soft pleading to his tone that was only ever for Tinik to hear, "Will you help me end this nightmare, my love?"

Tinik was silent for a long time. Then she twitched, sinking a fraction in the Krik-Tar gesture for submission. "Yes, Kom," she said. "I will help you end this nightmare."


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

"I think we're being followed."

It was exactly what they didn't need. Also exactly what the Doctor was expecting. Kom had a mission, after all. That was fine, but as they had been exiting the golf course, Angel had said the sun would be up soon; and that would be a very big problem for him. The best plan was to get back to the TARDIS and wait within her safe walls for the sun to set again and maybe for something like a plan to develop.

The Doctor looked over at Angel next to him on the tram's bench. The carriage was completely empty - devoid of even a driver in this age of autonomous vehicles - and yet they had ended up sitting side by side in their almost-identical leather jackets with similar tired-but-trying-to-hide-it expressions. Angel was glancing warily out the window behind them, focused on something through the glare of the interior lighting.

The Doctor forced himself to stay seated for the moment. Better not the let their pursuer know what they knew. "Can you see who it is?" he asked. He stretched and tried to see through the glass, but the angle was wrong. Assuming it was Kom, it was all according to plan. Except he hadn't made the plan yet and he would have preferred if he had time to get back to the TARDIS, dispose of the Dalek technology, and come up with a plan. But since he would likely be forced for develop the plan on the go, this must be a part of it.

"Who else would it be?" Angel replied. "I'm actually respected around here, believe it or not. People know to leave me alone."

"Ah. Well, I've been known to have very complicated days. How fast is he closing in? Do we need to get off?"

"I don't know, I lost track of-"

There was a sudden bang and the tram lurched sideways - or backwards the way that they were sitting along the left side - but managed to right itself again, and both the Doctor and Angel used the momentum to launch themselves up. Something on the tram's dash beeped and the carriage slowed down automatically; a safety response to getting in an accident. The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver, pointing it at the tram controls and overriding the system. The tram sped up again, convinced the accident hadn't happened.

"How far are we from Merlin Park Woods?" the Doctor asked. The TARDIS was parked by the old ruined castle. For aesthetics, presumably. Or in hopes of finding Merlin. The TARDIS could be romantically inclined like that.

"Close," Angel replied. "The Institute of Technology is coming up. If we get off there-" there was another crash and they both grabbed onto the ceiling rails for balance, "-we can cut through the woods. Shake him off, maybe, on the way to your ship."

Under the sonic's encouragement, the tram sped up. There was another bang, only this one sharper-sounding, and when the Doctor turned, he saw the shiny green of an armored Krik-Tar claw not a foot from his face. It withdrew back up through the ceiling.

The Doctor crouched near the floor of the tram, looking up at the hole in the ceiling. "With any luck, Tinik might show up again and explain things to him," the Doctor said.

That was when a matte brown claw shattered the glass at the front of the tram.

"Of course, that would require luck," the Doctor admitted.

Angel swore. "Can you sonic the door open? It locks in motion."

He could. The Doctor directed the sonic screwdriver at the door of the tram and it opened with an unhappy ding and a shower of sparks.

"Tinik?" he called, ducking under another stabbing claw from above. Tinik did not answer. Another failed negotiation to his name, then. He remembered a time when he could defuse situations. He wondered if the war had burned the skill out of him.

"I hope you're okay with jumping out of moving vehicles," Angel said, preparing himself to jump.

"Sure I am," the Doctor replied, "but we don't have to." He aimed the sonic at the dash again. "You might want to hold on," he warned, and clicked the button just as Angel grabbed the ceiling rail again. The screwdriver sounded and the tram screeched as it stopped dead in the road. There was a frantic scrambling of claws above and a shriek from Tinik's direction up front, but Angel was already slipping out the door, the Doctor close behind.

Outside the tram, the Institute of Technology stood in front of them: a three story white building that was overshadowed by large wind poles that towered behind it. They dashed off down the sidewalk to the right, which was unfortunately toward Tinik, but Angel was past her by the time she got two shaky legs under her and the Doctor was just on his heels. Behind them, Kom screeched in rage.

Angel was fast . The Doctor was fast, too - years of practice and long legs this regeneration - but even on a broken leg and limping, Angel was keeping pace with the Doctor and they dashed into the upcoming street with only a quick glance for traffic.

Behind them, two sets of scorpion legs clicked rapidly in pursuit. After the street crossing was another building, and then another, and then several tall trees appeared out of the darkness. Angel veered left into these trees and the Doctor followed.

It was much darker in the woods, and it kept getting darker the deeper they went in. Even though it was the middle of a city, Merlin Park Woods had been protected from development for centuries, and the trees grew thick and tall around them. They crossed over a running trail. Angel jumped over a branch and the Doctor could hear his grunt of pain when he landed. Behind them, Kom screamed a hair-raising " Time Lord! " with a hatred that sliced the Doctor's hearts in half.

Tinik appeared out of nowhere. Dark and shadowy and as brown as the trees in front of them, she moved and the Doctor ducked. He could see the third of a second between him and decapitation by Krik-Tar claw.

"Tinik," he gasped, trying to think of a plea that would stop her in that third of a second. There was none, so he said, "Please. Wait."

Her tail struck, but swung high and he ducked again. While she was much stronger and quite capable of killing him, she wasn't used to killing. Her tail shook as it raised, like an untrained finger on a gun. The Doctor prepared to dodge a third time, but suddenly Tinik shrieked and was jerked backwards.

Angel, who had gotten one of Tinik's legs, gave it another vicious tug, dragging her back another few feet. Her free legs dug trenches in dirt. The strength involved was stunning when the Doctor considered it. He'd known that Angel was strong, but to that point hadn't really seen it on display.

Tinik stopped trying to fight against Angel and instead whirled toward him. Angel held onto her back leg and was thrown right into the Doctor; they landed with an oof on the ground side by side.

The view from the ground was, incidentally, much wider than the view from standing up. For instance, they could see Tinik hovering nervously on their left side and Kom rapidly approaching from the right. How useful.

"Wait!" the Doctor cried. He wanted to raise his arms, but guessed that the gesture wasn't the right one. He searched his memory for a Krik-Tar of surrender and realized that he had landed in it: on his back.

"Did you wait?" Kom yelled, sliding to a halt next to them and sending a spray of dirt over the Doctor and Angel. He raised his stinger and poised it coolly above him. "Before you destroyed our peace did you hesitate?"

The Doctor hadn't destroyed that planet's peace and he didn't know who had. Maybe they had hesitated. Maybe they had been one of a million other Time Lords who loved puzzles and lengthy discussions and silly high collars. Maybe it had been the Rani, who would have done it without so much as a second thought. He was never sure what had happened to her. But the Doctor had destroyed another planet.

"Yes," he said, "yes, I hesit-" the Doctor trailed off, his eyes catching a shift in the trees off to the left of Kom. Some instinct shouted at him. "Angel," he whispered, "what is that?" he jerked his head to indicate the direction.

Angel's gaze shifted from Kom to look.

"Not long enough," Kom growled.

"No, wait," Angel said, holding up a hand and lifting himself onto his other elbow to squint into the woods. "Shit." He started to push himself up slowly and cautiously. "Kom," he said, keeping his voice low, "What did you do to Gladys?"

That resulted in a confused twitch of Kom's tail. "What? Who?" His head shifted, tempted to look in the same direction as Angel, but wary of falling into a trap.

"The hellhound," Angel replied, his voice still a forced calm. Of course, that was going to be completely unhelpful to an alien who didn't know what a hellhound was.

"The creature in the tunnels," the Doctor said quickly, almost talking over Angel.

"I defended myself and Tinik against your beast," Kom said. "I won."

"Well," Angel tilted his head nonchalantly despite the low growl that suddenly came from the darkness just off to Kom's right, "then I guess Abner's come looking for some revenge. And I think Gladys had just whelped, too." He slowly put his hands on the ground and pushed himself up to a sitting position.

The Doctor also shifted his arms to give himself more leverage to push off the ground. "We need to run," he said. "Back to the TARDIS."

Kom scuttled around behind Angel and the Doctor, keeping them in sight while looking in the direction of the growl. A gigantic paw stepped onto a log and a shadow loomed behind it.

If Gladys had been big, Abner was huge. The log creaked and cracked as the weight of the beast shifted onto it. Abner's coat was as black as a charred soul, his chest as broad as a shield, and his legs as thick as clubs. His eyes burned red like hellfire and the Doctor swore some of his teeth were as long as the Doctor's fingers.

The Doctor sat up and got his feet under him, and beside him Angel stood up, too, hopping on his good leg until he got his balance.

"Call it off," Kom said tensely. For the first time, he sounded less than confident about going into a fight and given the damage to his armour caused by the much smaller Gladys, the Doctor couldn't blame him.

"Can't," Angel said, taking one step back away from the beast, but with Kom behind them he couldn't go too much further. Tinik, seeming to take Angel's cue, also stepped warily away. "This dog isn't exactly trained."

"They were just in the tunnels. We didn't set them on you," the Doctor tried to explain, but this wasn't the time for explanations. They needed to run. He also backed up until he stepped within reach of Kom's claw and then paused, trying to weigh the two dangers and coming to something of a grim equilibrium.

Kom adjusted his weight, lowering his head and raising his tail threateningly.

Abner, now over the log, took his own threatening stance, his teeth bared and glistening. A growl so low that the Doctor felt it in his chest responded to Kom's stance.

"Kom," the Doctor said, "you're hurt. Angel's hurt. Tinik and I are not fighters. Let's get out of here and you can get back to threatening me. Yeah?"

"He's right," Tinik said. "Kom, you barely won against the other one."

"I was drugged," Kom said. He gave his body a shake, warming up for the fight to come.

"And now you're hurt."

"Going with a Time Lord won't be any safer," Kom said. "It'll only give the creature another chance to ambush us."

Angel had managed to navigate himself so that his backward motion would take him between Kom and Tinik, and he said, still limping away, "Yeah, well, I'm going with the Time Lord. You two can sort this out with Abner on your own."

Abner stalked forward, his growl deepening and hackles raised like black spikes on his back. He gave one final warning bark before he lunged straight at the Doctor and Kom.

The Doctor dived to the ground as Kom and Abner crashed into each other. He heard the snap of teeth closing and the crack of claws. On the other side of the fight, Tinik shrieked. Kom's tail struck again and again at the thick hide of the hellhound.

"Kom!" Tinik shouted from behind the Doctor.

A giant paw hit the ground next to the Doctor's head. He rolled and crawled, trying to get out of the way of the stomping paws and feet as Kom and Abner fought for the upper hand. Claw. Paw? Strong hands (hand-hands) suddenly gripped the Doctor under both arms and yanked him away from the fight; he could hear Angel's familiar grunt of pain.

"Come on," Angel said, hauling the Doctor to his feet. "Let's hope they take care of each other for us."

The Doctor set off at a run the second he was on his feet. Already, new plans were forming and being discarded. "What? No! We have to stop this!" He crashed through the underbrush, heading for the TARDIS. If they wouldn't go to the TARDIS, he was just going to have to bring the TARDIS to them.

Behind him, Angel made several confused noises and then followed after him. Hands outstretched to sweep away unseen branches, the Doctor led the way over logs and leaves and occasionally crossing the running trail again until the trees abruptly stopped and a ruinous castle loomed across the lawn in front of them, the TARDIS right where the Doctor had left her in front of it.

He crossed the last bit of lawn while digging in his pocket for the TARDIS key. The Doctor crashed into the door, shoved the key into the lock, and shouldered his way inside. "Get in!" he shouted at Angel, already running for the console. The door closed and he assumed without looking to check that Angel made it inside. He threw the lever.

The TARDIS thrummed and turned, lifting from the grass. The Doctor reached for the screen, looking for some level of feedback on his steering. "Angel, come press this button!" he shouted. He reached for several controls, trying to navigate across the field and into the woods. It had been ages since he'd actually flown the TARDIS and the TARDIS complained about the change. Loudly. The engines groaned and clacked. Angel stumbled over to press the button, which the Doctor had to point out again when he reached it.

"And this," he said, moving on along the console, tugging the screen with him. The ship shuddered as a corner impacted a tree. "Easy!" the Doctor shouted at himself, or maybe the tree.

"I only pressed the button like you said!" Angel shouted back. "How am I supposed to be 'easy' about it?"

"Not you," the Doctor grumbled. "Now press the one to the left of it. We need to keep the speed down."

Angel pressed the button to the left and the brakes dragged the ship down enough to not break anything like the sound barrier. Or spacetime.

"This might be a bad time to tell you," Angel said as the Doctor passed him again, "but I've never actually flown a spaceship before."

"Good. Then you won't go trying to do anything I don't tell you to," the Doctor said, furiously making adjustments.

They hit another tree. But they were also almost there.

"Go!" the Doctor shouted, pointing at the door. "Get the door!"

Muttering something about a stupid plan, Angel went to the door, limping, but at least quickly.

The screen indicated approaching life forms and the Doctor adjusted the heading slightly.

He looked over his shoulder as Angel opened the door and peered out into the dark night. On the monitor, the Doctor could just make out the dark form of the hellhound pinning a Krik-tar to the ground. Teeth flashed and the Doctor heard the shriek of metal being torn away.

The TARDIS crashed through the bushes and into the hellhound, knocking it to the ground with a pained yelp, and the ship settled into the dirt in front of a shocked and bleeding Kom.

"Get in," Angel said to them sharply. "Or don't, but I don't think we could hit Abner again if we tried. This guy's an insane driver." He jabbed his thumb back toward the Doctor.

"Tinik," the Doctor shouted, "If you're out there, get in!"

"Tinik! " Kom's voice shouted. Angel suddenly moved back and seconds later Tinik's huge brown form shoved her way through the open door. The Doctor could hear Kom grunt in frustration and an angry-sounding canine whine, and Kom soon followed.

Angel leaned out the door and shouted to the hellhound, "Sorry about Gladys!" before he slammed the door shut.

A moment later the door shuddered as the hellhound threw himself at the door.

"Okay!" the Doctor said. He slammed his hand down on the dematerialization lever and pulled. The TARDIS jumped like a racehorse from a gate, pleased to be free to move as she wanted. Once they reached the vortex, the Doctor moved to the next panel to input coordinates for the Saltek Cluster.

"Where are you taking us?" Tinik's voice asked from somewhere behind him.

"Where you belong," the Doctor said. He made a few additional adjustments on the console and then turned and crossed his arms, leaning casually against the console. "Your home," he clarified. "Whatever is left of it. That's what I can give you."

Kom was oozing a transparent brownish fluid onto the TARDIS floor and several plates of green armor were missing. Tinik was holding one of his legs in her claw the way a frightened couple might hold hands. Kom glowered at the Doctor, but the Doctor kept his focus on Tinik, who at least seemed to be listening. She nodded.

"It's not what you wanted," the Doctor added. "It's unsatisfactory. For reparations. But I'm all that's left of the Time Lords. This is all that's left of what destroyed your planet," he waved his hand at the TARDIS. "Maybe killing me will make it better, but I doubt it. I know that I killed the Daleks that started the war, and I ended the war by destroying my people. It didn't make anything better for me."

Kom shifted, painfully dragging his feet under him. His tail rested against his back, hanging oddly. "How can we know that you won't hurt anyone else?" he asked.

"How can you know that about anyone?" Angel asked before the Doctor could respond. There was a rustling and a metallic slide as Angel pushed himself up on the railing of the ramp, breathing out in relief to get off his injured leg. "Can we know that you won't hurt anyone else?"

Kom and Tinik were silent.

Angel shrugged, looking tired and like the pain was starting to catch up with him. "Look, he's right. Killing him won't help. I mean, it'll feel good for a minute, but…" He faded under the glare the Doctor had shot him. "But…it won't last and he's not the one who-" Angel's expression softened, relenting to the idea the Doctor had come to over and over these past several hours: he wasn't the one who destroyed the Krik-Tar's history, but was there a reason he shouldn't be held accountable for it?

Angel's expression abruptly hardened again and he switched tracks. "Well, listen, we've all had sucky days. Years. Centuries. But you know what? Out of all of us, the Doctor is the one still trying to make friends. Which is...kind of stupid if you ask me, but you could try...that. Too."

The Doctor suddenly felt exhausted. Angel's stumbling excuses only highlighted what he already knew: there wasn't a good answer. There wasn't some easy way forward for any of them. Maybe trying to reach out was all he could do. Reach out to something other than war. That's why he'd wanted Rose to come with him so much.

He pushed away from the console and slowly stepped down to Kom's level, and then crouched down. Kom and Tinik had slid to the floor, despite Kom's efforts to keep his many feet under him, but the Doctor's head was still lower than theirs because of their massive size. "I'll drop you off," he said. "And then I'll need to take Angel home. After that, I can promise to never come back to your planet, or I can return and you can decide what to do with me then."

Tinik shifted oddly against the floor, the tips of her pointed feet slipping into the holes of the grating and keeping her off balance. "Why save us?" she asked. "As the other one said, you could have let the creature take care of your problem."

The Doctor stared back, thinking through logic that had been instinct when he'd made the decision. He swallowed. "I want to go back, too," he said. "It's what I would have done before the war."

"And why promise to come back, if we might decide to kill you?" she asked.

At this point, it seemed as fitting an ending as any. "Reparations are due," he said. "And I'm the only one who can pay them. My life is just about all I have left to give you."

The silence in the TARDIS was so heavy it was almost suffocating. The moments of thought and considering crept by like a slow motion free fall; a suspension between insanity and faith.

Several of Kom's curled up legs slipped out from him, giving way to exhaustion and screeching on the metal grating like nails. He sighed. "We have a saying," he said, "that what is offered is given. Just take us home."

It was like hitting the ground after his freefall. An abrupt stop. A bit like dying. A bit like regeneration. "Okay," the Doctor said. He pushed himself to his feet and slowly climbed back up to the console.

They landed not long after, the Doctor slowly guiding the TARDIS back to the planet. When it let out the final THRUM he turned back the the others.

"Do I have to open the door?" Angel asked, sitting a mere three feet from it.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at Angel, but relented and reached over to press the button to open the TARDIS door. He turned his attention back to Kom and Tinik. Tinik moved first, carefully making her way across the short distance to look outside.

"It's home, Kom!" she declared. "Our own cave!"

Kom shifted and turned to look. His compound eyes couldn't have possibly narrowed, but the expression on his face gave the same effect. "How did…?" He pushed himself up, grunting, leaving a sticky pool of Krik-Tar blood under him, and slowly made his way toward the door, Tinik stepping out first and then turning to offer him a claw.

The Doctor walked down from the platform, following at a slight distance. "I have my ways," he said. He tucked his hands into his pockets when he reached the door. It felt wrong to step onto the planet, even if he'd never been there before.

Kom turned back around, supported by Tinik. None of them seemed to have anything to say. The Doctor was about to turn, or maybe lift a hand, or something else completely inadequate for a situation like this, when Kom finally said,

"Thank you."

The Doctor pushed his hands deeper into his pockets.

"Don't come back," Tinik added softly. "It- We need to move on. We'll say you're dead."

The Doctor nodded.

Tinik hesitated, like she was about to add something and then she and Kom turned and headed, limping, deeper into their home.


	6. Chapter 6

"You know why I like scotch?" Angel said suddenly, dangling a glass of scotch between two fingers in front of him. "It tastes like the sun. Or how I always thought the sun would taste."

They were sitting, once again, in the Dragon's Crown, side by side at the bar, and the silence needed to be broken. When the Doctor had told the Krik-Tars that he would take Angel home before returning for their judgment, if they chose (which...damn), Angel had assumed that that meant his real home.

Which was a reasonable assumption, given that they had landed in the Krik-Tars' actual cave-house. But no, when it was Angel's turn to be taken home, they had landed at the Dragon's Crown (a whole day later, no less), and though Angel had some objections to that implication, secretly he couldn't really deny it, either. He did spend a lot of time there.

So Angel had invited the Doctor for a drink and now he was starting to regret it. The Doctor had initially responded with an almost aggressive flash of teeth and a bright "Why not?" and after that had fallen into a dark, sullen silence. And that silence was a bitch to break.

It wasn't like there weren't any important topics to bring up. Should I tell you I think I kill you in the future? topped that for Angel. It was just that there wasn't a good way to bring it up and Angel was maxed out on heavy topics for the night. And with what the Doctor was going through, adding more seemed insensitive and a bit cruel.

But Angel was never good at small talk, either. The scotch tastes like the sun line was pulled straight out of his ass.

Hunched over the bar, his neck protected by the bunch of his leather jacket and his elbows resting on the counter, the Doctor tipped his as-of-yet untasted glass of scotch so that it caught the light; something he'd been doing since it had been given to him. "Isn't that going to taste like death for someone like you?" he asked.

"I'm pretty sure everyone dies if they taste the sun, not just vampires," Angel replied. "I was being…" he waved his free hand vaguely, searching for the word. Poetic and romantic both fit, but he didn't particularly want to use either.

"Yes," the Doctor nodded before Angel could settle on any substitute words. "More sun in a field. Warm. Comforting. Home."

"That's it," Angel agreed, pleased that that line had worked. "Warm with a bit of scorching. A bit of bite."

The Doctor twisted his glass in the other direction on the bar, grunting in acknowledgement.

Another dreadful silence fell and Angel was struggling to come up with some other bit small talk when the Doctor said, "So what are your plans now?"

"Plans?" Angel looked over at the Doctor in surprise. He had to have plans? Weren't things going just fine without plans? Well, they had been, until the Cole kid showed up. It seemed like that needed a plan. Trouble was, he was pretty sure he'd worked his way into the plan of buying milk for the next time the kid came over without even meaning to. He'd backed out of that nonsense when the Doctor had shown up.

Angel brought the glass of scotch to his lips and asked just before he took a sip, "You think I need a plan?"

The Doctor shrugged. "I just thought I'd make an effort," he said. He looked over at Angel for the first time since he'd sat down and raised an eyebrow.

Angel nodded thoughtfully. "I probably need a plan," he admitted. "But I don't know what it is."

"You said it involved milk," the Doctor said.

"That's the scarier plan," Angel replied. "The insidious one that you never see coming until it's in your fridge, waiting for a visitor that actually drinks it. I liked my other plan much better."

"Which plan's that?" the Doctor asked. He tipped his glass the other way. " This plan?" he asked his drink.

Angel set his glass down on the bar, but didn't let go of it. "The plan where I'm a big scary vampire who's too old and grumpy to be interesting to little kids."

The side of the Doctor's mouth twitched. "That won't work."

"I noticed," Angel said glumly. "Any advice?"

"There's nothing kids love more than scary, old, grumpy, but tolerant things." The Doctor shifted on his stool, leaning an elbow on the bar. "Have you tried telling them to do their homework, eat their vegetables, and clean their room?"

"God, I do not want to be their father," Angel replied, shivering. Two hundred years and he was still broken under the crush of that experience.

"And they probably don't want you to be," the Doctor said. "That's what I would do, if I wanted rid of them."

Angel let the idea sink in. It did make sense… It didn't feel good, though.

The Doctor bent his knee, balancing his foot on one of the rungs of the stool. "Maybe I should take one of them," he said. "I bet a kid would want to see the universe."

Now there was an idea. "Just don't take the kid with the mother that cares, though," Angel warned. "She would kill you without hesitating."

"Right. Mothers." The Doctor lifted his scotch to his lips. "And I doubt they would survive something like what happened today. Maybe it's better to just...not."

"Is that why you're...not?" Angel asked, glancing over at the Doctor.

"I asked her, didn't I?" the Doctor said. He drank the rest of his scotch with a single sharp jerk of his wrist. "It used to be easy. Even without mentioning time travel."

Yeah. Grief made everything harder. Like trying to walk across a shattered sheet of glass without getting cut. Eventually you learn to tell which pieces will cut the deepest and you avoid them with rules like Don't buy the kids milk for their tea .

"So how long has it been, then?" Angel asked. "Since your last companion?"

"Before the war," the Doctor said, wincing from the scotch.

Angel nodded. "It's been a while for me, too," he finally said.

The Doctor reached across Angel and picked up the bottle of scotch that had been left for them from the bar. "What sort of stupid ape would rather stay home than see the universe?" The Doctor waved the bottle at the universe - or at least the room.

"When your first destination includes a demon bar with a vampire in Ireland?" Angel shrugged. "Doesn't make sense, does it?"

The Doctor turned his head, squinting at the demons that occupied the bar. "I guess that isn't normal for this time period is it?" he said, just realizing that a demon bar was somehow different from the other bars. He turned back around and poured more scotch into his glass. "I didn't say 'let's go to a demon bar in Ireland.'"

"Yeah, but you kind of have that look," Angel replied.

"What look is that?" the Doctor said indignantly.

The Let's go to a demon bar in Ireland look? But Angel shrugged noncommittally and said, "Nothing. Never mind." He took a long sip of scotch, savoring it.

"I happen to have saved her, her mother - which I admit might have not been the best thing for the world - and her thick boyfriend. That tends to negate any and all fashion choices."

"Wasn't talking about your clothes," Angel said. He glanced at the Doctor's outfit and decided not to comment. He actually rather liked the coat, but he didn't want to admit it. And also, he was talking a little bit about the clothes. Angel wore his own leather coat because it enhanced his own similar that look aura.

"I'll have you know that I'm still getting used to the ears and will toss you into the nearest sun if you make any comment along those lines." The Doctor gave Angel a very pointed look that was just enough to make Angel wonder if he meant it.

"The ears are fine," Angel replied obligatorily. "I guess it's not so much the look as the vibe."

"I do not ," the Doctor said, "have a 'vibe.'"

"Everyone has a vibe," Angel replied, turning back to his drink. "Your vibe is kind of like mine."

The Doctor folded his arms. "How's that then?" he asked after a long pause. "Dead?"

"Worse than that," Angel replied. "Inaccessible."

The Doctor snorted. "Right," he said.

Angel shrugged. "Fine, then. Find yourself a companion."

No reply followed. The Doctor hunched his shoulders over the bar and returned to twisting his glass between his fingers. "The thing is," he said eventually, "I never really thought of you as inaccessible."

Angel snorted. "You're probably the first."

The Doctor shrugged. "Maybe I caught you at the wrong time… But you standing there in that field with that slapped-by-a-fish expression? And then you hit me. Nah. You've always seemed sort of honest to me."

"I guess it depends on who I'm talking to," Angel replied. "And who I am when I'm speaking."

"Should I be flattered?"

Angel considered the Doctor for a long moment. This was so far one of the friendliest conversations he'd had with someone in about two centuries. And he liked the Doctor. Despite certain annoying habits. And wasn't friendship where you don't mind being around someone despite their annoying habits? Angel was pretty sure he read that in a meme once.

Angel's mouth twitched in a smile. "If you want. Flattery feels nice."

"Oh, shove off," the Doctor said, rolling his eyes.

Angel chuckled and took a deep sip of his drink in response. When he set his glass down again and had let the warm bite slide pleasantly down his throat, he said, "In the spirit of accessibility, then, can I ask you a moral question? It's related to time travel."

The Doctor let out a laugh, only slightly more than a heavy exhale through his nose. "I wish more people would. Keep everyone out of trouble," he said into his glass.

Angel nodded. "If I know something that could save lives," he hedged, "do I have a responsibility to tell someone who can stop it so they could...stop it?"

"You want to go back in time and warn someone?" the Doctor clarified.

"Kind of..."

The Doctor shook his head. "Short answer: no."

"I wouldn't mind the long answer," Angel said.

The Doctor poured more scotch into his glass even though he hadn't so much as taken a drink from it. "The long answer," he said, "is: it depends. There are rules and nuances. Levels of risk of blowing up the universe or changing the timeline to something worse. Or just changing the timeline, which is just as bad for most people. People hate change and they have a hard time believing that different isn't worse ." He picked up his glass from the counter and turned on the stool, leaning back and balancing his elbows on the counter in a relaxed position. "Problem is, if it goes south, no one will turn up to clean up the mess." He lifted the scotch to his lips and took a drink, swallowing hard.

Because there were no more Time Lords to do it. Right.

Although arguably, the one Time Lord left to fix the fallout would be present and invested in fixing it… "You said it depends," Angel said. "When would it be right?"

The Doctor lifted the glass again, but lowered it without taking a sip. "The safest example is when you know that you're supposed to. Like if you were to see yourself from the future warning the person, so you go back and do the same. Essentially closing the loop. What you want is a very clear path of cause and effect."

Angel nodded slowly. There definitely wasn't a clear path of cause and effect, here. The future Doctor hadn't made any indication that he knew what Angel was going to do before Angel decided to do it. He'd been struggling for an answer to save Angel's life just as much as Angel had. If Angel told the Doctor about the incident now, the Doctor could have planned ahead; stored up jars of his own blood beforehand to give to Angel when the thingamawhatsit broke.

Which meant that Angel hadn't told him. Wouldn't tell him. Or maybe he would and risk the consequences.

"What if it's an attempt to right your own wrong?" Angel finally asked.

Another flash of that slightly mad smile. "No one ever goes back in time to do anything else," he said.

Angel managed half a smile of his own. "Of course…" he agreed. "And what if there's no clear path of cause and effect but it's an easy thing to prevent. What if they just need one...tool?"

"But if they had that tool the first time, would you have warned them?" the Doctor raised an eyebrow at him. "Being technically easy to change doesn't mean it's less damaging to the timeline. Often, small events that can be changed for big outcomes cause more damage. Like knocking down a load bearing wall." He let out a sigh and unhooked his heel from the stool to swing it along the side. "What is it that you want to change?"

Angel shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "The death of a friend. Probably." Angel figured the probably worked for both the death part and the friend part.

The Doctor looked away. He focused back on his glass of whiskey. "I'm sorry," he said.

Angel nodded. "Yeah," he agreed. "Me, too." Silence fell between them, deepening as Angel realized that that was the end of the conversation: the Doctor's answer was no. No, Angel should not try to save the Doctor's life. Angel wondered if the answer would change if the Doctor knew it was himself they were talking about, but he knew that wouldn't make the answer right. Just biased.

"Okay…" Angel said finally. "Thanks." Angel swallowed, the sharpness of the decision not to try to save a friend's life feeling almost tangible in his heart and throat.

Another silence fell, but it seemed deeper and somehow less uncomfortable. Or, yes, uncomfortable but in a personal misery sort of way instead of awkward sort of way. Maybe that was better.

"It would be interesting," the Doctor said, leaning his shoulder in Angel's direction like he was going to nudge him, but never actually make contact, "if someone asked to go back and fix someone else's mistake." He lifted a shoulder and added quickly, "I'd probably still say no but it would be novel."

"Really?" Angel asked, also looking out at the people of the bar. "In all your time traveling, no one's asked to fix something they didn't start? The Holocaust? Wars? Nothing?" Angel's faith in humanity wasn't very high, but it had been high enough to expect that.

The Doctor waved his free hand indifferently. "The Holocaust," he said dismissively. "Sure, people ask, but I think they know the answer before they do. If it could be done, wouldn't it have been done already? It's existence is self-proving."

"But if no one asks because it hasn't been changed, it'll never get changed," Angel pointed out. He looked over at the Doctor. "Hey, can we go fix the Holocaust?"

That made the Doctor smile. Something a little less mad. He lifted his shoulder again. "Nah. Not without blowing a hole in the universe. Sorry."

Angel shrugged. "Thought I'd try."

"I appreciate that," the Doctor said. He twisted his glass, tilting it to catch the light.

Angel took a deep sip of scotch that finished off his glass. He set it aside until he decided he wanted a refill. "So," he asked, "how often are you tempted to go back and fix mistakes? The ones without universe-exploding consequences?"

The Doctor looked over at him, his eyes sharp and noticeably blue. "If I got on that ride, I'd probably never get off." He lifted his glass to Angel and downed the rest of it in a large gulp. Wincing, he twisted enough to set the glass down. "Tinik was right. We need to move forward through time."

"What about changing something so you can move forward?" Angel asked. "It's not too late to go back for Rose, right?"

The Doctor slumped a little deeper into his coat, his arms bent at what was probably an uncomfortable angle with his elbows still supporting him on the bar. "She has to look after her boyfriend ," he grumbled, rolling his eyes.

Angel raised an eyebrow. "If she's so codependent as to prefer looking after her boyfriend to traveling all of time and space - even despite your vibe - I think you'd be better off looking elsewhere anyway, then."

"I did leave out the time bit. It's a real selling point." The Doctor pulled himself up. "Maybe you're right. Better off without. Look at you. You're fine."

Angel snorted. He wasn't fine. He knew that. He was managing at an emotionally safe distance. But he was content there, and wasn't especially interested in changing things. "Try the time bit," he advised. "Just throw it out there, and if it still doesn't work, then forget it."

The Doctor nodded, his eyes scanning over the booths on the opposite wall. "Maybe I will," he said quietly.

They fell into another silence and Angel began earnestly debating if he wanted another glass of scotch.

"What about you?" The Doctor asked just as Angel was making up his mind to reach for the bottle. "Going to keep those kids around?"

Angel shrugged with more nonchalance than he felt. "They like my stories," he said. "But you know, the mother that cares found out what I am, so she might not even let her kid come visit anymore. Maybe I should just let fate decide through her."

The Doctor grunted something of an agreement. "I wouldn't fight a mother," he said. "Too scary." They fell into another silence, but Angel noticed that this one was comfortable. More comfortable than so many of the silences in his life lately. "But if she doesn't," the Doctor mused, adjusting his position to sit up, "telling stories...it can be nice. When you retell them to someone that young...they get edited. It's like rewriting the past. Just for a bit."

Angel swallowed. "Yeah," he said quietly. It was. "But what happens when they get older?"

"Do what's good for 'em," the Doctor said.

Angel paused briefly. "Shun them?"

The Doctor let out his burst of laughter. That single "Ha!" that contained all of his amusement. "Shunning people makes you seem mysterious. That makes them come back. Tell them the truth. Tell what they don't want to hear but need to hear for their own good. If that doesn't get rid of them..." he paused, considering. "Well, maybe by that point you won't want to."

Angel's stomach clenched at the thought. He wasn't ready for that. He swore he never would again. "I should move," Angel said.

"Or you could do that," the Doctor agreed. "I do that all the time."

"You take people with you," Angel said. "That kind of defeats the point."

"Only if time travel really does tip the scales in my favor," the Doctor said. He pushed himself up, standing from the stool and started to pat at his pockets.

"If it doesn't," Angel said, "will you come back and tell me not to buy that milk?"

He pushed his hands into his pockets. One emerged with what looked like a wallet and after a moment, the other hand pulled out a carton of milk. Condensation still dripped on the side of the carton. "Here," he said, holding it out. "If I have to, then so do you."

Angel reached out and took the carton, wincing at the cool wetness. "You are a bastard," he muttered.

"Yeah," the Doctor sighed. He swiped the wallet over the payment screen on the bar counter. It beeped pleasantly. He held out his hand to Angel. "Consider it revenge for that brain-muddling spell."

Angel winced again and took the Doctor's hand. "I'll accept that," he agreed. "Good luck."

"And you," the Doctor replied. They shook on it and the Doctor stepped away, toward the back of the bar where the TARDIS had parked.

* * *

 **A/N** : Thanks for reading, everyone! The series will continue with Pull to Open; where the Doctor and Angel become temporary roommates. And yes, that is the whole plot.


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